Working Your Way Out

As the novel, The Crying Of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon began, I was lost in the multiple stories and non-linear narrations. As I realized that I was lost, halfway through the second paragraph, I decided to go back and try to give it a second shot. I then understood. The book is basically the story of a woman, Oedipa Mass, who just received a letter from a law firm about her ex-boyfriend’s death. His will, asked for her to manage his business, something she truly doesn’t know how to do, so she consults with her husband (who is a disk jockey). Pynchon then narrates that her husband recommends her to go to their lawyer, Mr. Roseman who suddenly asks her to run away with him, having no effect whatsoever on her.

These weird paragraphs captured my complete attention in a unique, torturous fashion. I never expected to be tormented by the words of a book that looked so simple, so weak and little, but it happened. Pynchon continued his narration with Oedipa, who now believes she was like Rapunzel and her ex-boyfriend, Pierce tried to climb up her hair but it was “when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass” (11). Now I definitely knew something, Mrs. Mass was trying to run away from something that tormented her. She was trying to not let things build up so readily, so perfect and dreamed of. She was afraid of perpetuity, of living her whole life as the one who was rescued from the tall tower by the mighty, rich man.

Pynchon supports this conclusion in the next couple of sentences as he states that “all that had gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower” (11). It was this defining moment of the relationship between the two individuals that lead to their breakup. Pierce was simply too busy buying the world for Oedipa that she decided to leave him, but she was ironically left his business to manage. The fake hair became her way out of the unlivable, charmless situation she had gotten into with Pierce, and it was the mighty tower, the one which didn’t let him in, her powerful ego. I wonder where will Pynchon lead us with this story and what his final message is going to be. It felt a bit like reading a modern fairytale written by someone locked up in a mental institution.