This is perhaps my favorite Pynchon, earning points for reasons that hold his other maximalist novels back: the lack of emergent "grand" plot despite spanning hundreds and hundreds of pages and remaining some of the densest prose imaginable. Now, as always when making characterizations about how an author fails to live up to my genre-specific expectations, it does and ought to indicate something when his tour de force novels like V. and Gravity's Rainbow cover so much but neglect to develop salient meanings – perhaps that they were never trying to do so in the first place and I ought to find another yardstick against which to measure them. Sure, fair. And yet, ... Crying of Lot 49 excels in its novella format because, absent book that would double as a load bearing structure, I'm not expecting greatness. I'm expecting fun, witticisms, some crossover characters, and some zane – and this book does all that better than I would expect most authors could replicate.

Reading this book is like micro-dosing concentrated ADHD. We get Bloody friggin Chiclitz who appears in both aforementioned Pynchon novels, we get songs, we get historically inspired conspiracy involving a niche arm of the government bureaucracy (USPS's rival: Thurn & Taxis who did legitimately exist as an independent German merchant house from the 15th Century to the 19th century), we got LSD-induced mania, homage Nabokov/Lolita who he was a student of (along with RBG, TIL) at Cornell – it's just a high concentrate dose of fun.

Makes me retroactively dislike his longer books which accomplish little more than that novella but consume 5-8x the word count

like none of his book have a conspiratorial payoff (which I’m sure is part of the “point”), but I feel owed some degree of emergent meaning or profundity when sinking dozens and dozens of hours into a book structured like tha

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