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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Crying of Lot 49, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning
American Modernity and Counterculture
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization
Summary
Analysis
Oedipa Maas returns home slightly inebriated from a Tupperware party and discovers that she is responsible for executing the last will and testament of wealthy real estate investor Pierce Inverarity. Confused, she calls up memories of her past and wonders how Inverarity might have died. Oedipa has received a letter from someone named Metzger at a Los Angeles law firm, who writes that Inverarity died several months before and promises to help Oedipa resolve any disputes that arise regarding the will. After reading the letter, Oedipa goes to the market and then spends the rest of the day making dinner and drinks for her husband, Wendell (who usually goes by his nickname, “Mucho”).
Oedipa Maas opens the novel in the role of an ordinary 1960s California housewife, attending Tupperware parties with other local women, cooking and cleaning, and caring for her husband. But Pynchon’s prose highlights her sense of boredom and alienation: for Oedipa, as for many women, domestic tasks are an empty, isolating routine, not a source of fulfilment. Like the characters’ names, the mysterious letter from Metzger is intentionally ambiguous. Through Oedipa’s sense of blind confusion at receiving it, Pynchon implies that it may not mean anything at all. By extension, he suggests that different elements of The Crying of Lot 49’s plot might not fit together—or need to fit together—at all. Indeed, nothing in the novel’s opening scene seems to have a clear purpose behind it—not least of all Oedipa’s daily routine.
Active
Themes
During the evening news, Oedipa remembers that she got a phone call in the middle of the night the year before. The caller made a bunch of absurd requests in different, exaggerated accents, and Oedipa knew it must be Pierce Inverarity. As Inverarity went on imitating The Shadow, Mucho told Oedipa to hang up. Inverarity warned that The Shadow will visit Mucho, then hung up. Oedipa did not even know where Inverarity was, and that was the last she heard from him.
While Mucho’s jealousy about Inverarity’s call suggests that Oedipa and Inverarity might have been involved in the past, the phone call also deepens the sense of the absurd and the surreal in the novel. The call contains no message—it is an empty act of communication with no content. Inverarity’s performance is totally one-sided: he completely disregards Oedipa, both by not giving her the chance to reply and by waking her up in the middle of the night in the first place. None of the identities Inverarity assumes seem realer than any of the others. Like The Shadow (an invisible detective character from mid-20th-century novels, comic books, and radio shows), Inverarity remains disguised throughout the novel. He leaves a mark on everything that Oedipa touches, and his presence (or absence) constantly haunts her as she looks for some meaning in his legacy and estate.
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Themes
Mucho gets home and starts complaining about his day at work. He is a radio DJ on the station KCUF, but he complains just as much as he used to at his old job selling used cars. Back then, he carefully tried to avoid embodying any stereotype about used-car salesmen, and he still gets uncomfortable whenever he sees things that remind him of old cars. He remembers cleaning trash out of the “godawful” cars that his working-class customers traded in. Maybe he would have enjoyed wrecking these cars in a junkyard, but he could not handle watching customer after customer trade one rundown car for another. Five years after leaving the used-car lot, Mucho still constantly complains about working there. Oedipa compares it to how the war haunts men a generation older than him.
Mucho complains to Oedipa that his boss, Funch, wants him to be less “horny” on the radio, especially when he talks to young women who call to request a song. Mucho announces that this is “censorship,” but he and Funch get into arguments like this all the time. Changing the subject, Oedipa shows Mucho the letter she received. Mucho, who was always jealous of Oedipa’s relationship with Pierce Inverarity, tells Oedipa that he cannot help and that she should check with their lawyer, Roseman.
Active
Themes
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Oedipa goes to visit Roseman the next morning, but first she spends half an hour doing her eye makeup. She is trying to disguise her exhaustion: she did not get any sleep because the phone rang again in the middle of the night, just like it did when Inverarity called her the year before. This time, it’s her therapist, Dr. Hilarius. He asks about Oedipa’s pills, but she explains that she is not taking them because she doesn’t know what they are. Hilarius is running an experiment on how local housewives respond to psychedelic drugs, but Oedipa refuses to participate.
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Themes
Hilarius tells Oedipa that “we want you,” which reminds her of the famous posters on which Uncle Sam says, “I want you,” for the army. Hilarius says that he feels like Oedipa was somehow calling for him, but Oedipa hangs up on him. Unable to sleep, Oedipa tells herself that she will never take Hilarius’s pills. She still visits him for therapy just because it would be complicated to stop. He likes to make faces, which he thinks can have a therapeutic effect. She remembers his “Fu-Manchu” face, in which he sticks out his tongue and stretches out his eyes, mouth, and nose.
Active
Themes
Like Oedipa, Roseman was awake all night: he was ruminating about Perry Mason, the TV lawyer whom he both admires and resents. When Oedipa walks into Roseman’s office, she catches him stuffing a bunch of papers—a draft of fictional charges against Perry Mason—into his desk. She awkwardly comments that Roseman looks less guilty than usual. (They first met in therapy.) Over lunch, Roseman clumsily hits on Oedipa while they discuss the will, and afterwards he explains all the work that goes into executing a will, from learning about Inverarity’s business and inventorying his estate to dealing with his taxes. Roseman says that he can help with the work, but it might be interesting for Oedipa.
Active
Themes
Oedipa contemplates inventorying the estate herself. She feels slightly buffered from the world, like watching an out-of-focus movie. In fact, she feels trapped in her boring life in the suburb of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, like Rapunzel in her tower. She briefly tasted excitement with Pierce Inverarity, like when they went to Mexico, where they visited an art exhibit by the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. Varo’s painting “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” (or “Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle”) depicted women in a tower embroidering a tapestry that contains the whole world. Looking at this painting, Oedipa started crying into her sunglasses because she realized that she never truly could escape her proverbial tower. Wherever she goes, some “formless magic” is holding her captive, and she is not sure what she can do to understand or escape it.
