The Crying of Lot 49

Do you know when you sit down with a story, or do you always know, I should say, that, like, you know the scope of the story you're gonna tell before you sit down to tell it? Or have you had a short story that has g- become ungainly and grown into a novella, or a novella that has grown ungainly and become a novel?

Yeah, like what does Thomas Pynchon say about "Crying Lot 49"? It's a short story with a glandular problem, you know? [chuckles]

Yeah.

[chuckles]

He's making an argument, and we, we might disagree with him and, right? I've obviously talked in this podcast a lot about novels that are very political and that I think are very good because they are very political.

Think of The Overstory, for example, which we discussed several months ago, uh, or, or obviously Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which has wonderful political set pieces set on college campuses.

So I don't necessarily agree with Murakami's anti-political stance.

At the same time, Murakami does a wonderful job of showing us why someone Would have no interest in politics.

it is impressive and even on Pynchon's part, um, how easily Lu slips into a different persona and embodies that other persona so well.

And the whole concept of communication through gas mains, and there being, like, TV... or not, I, I guess not, obviously not TV shows, but shows and things of that nature that are communicated through them is, you know, it's, it's a very, um, Pynchonian thing, even just down to, like, you know, like, the Tristero from Crying of Lot 49, which I do feel like there is, like, a small kind of reference to that kind of stuff in 43, I wanna say.

Um-

Mm

Sure.

I will say, during The Crying of Lot 49, it really did feel like he was on the inside.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Porky Pig cartoon

...

when we were reading The Crying of Lot 49 came back.

I can't...

...

when he was writing The Crying of Lot 49.

[laughs]

Yeah.

So like he does have a specific design for women characters in his story.

Is that something we can push onto Steinbeck or is it a sign or a representation of the time that this was written in? And I asked that because I just finished reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

And I don't know, have you read that?

No, I have not.

Which dives headfirst into a paranoid conspiracy.

This is Thomas Pynchon's 1966 work, The Crying of Lot 49.

Now, Urquhart makes a hilariously accurate point in the Collider piece about the demographic stereotype of a Thomas Pynchon reader.

Usually you picture a young male, highly obsessive reader mapping out conspiracies with red string on a corkboard.

His later massive epics like Gravity's Rainbow, V, or Mason & Dixon are incredibly dense.

They're labyrinthine texts filled with obscure historical tangents, complex scientific jargon, and dozens of intersecting plots.

But The Crying of Lot 49 is his shortest book.

It comfortably straddles the line between a long novella and a short novel.