The Crying of Lot 49

Thank god this is over. The first forty-five percent is impenetrable and the remainder is not worth penetrating. I could barely make myself slog through it, and at under 200 pages that's quite a feat. I have no idea why this is considered a classic.

The prose is as tortured as they come. Reading it is like listening to Robin Williams – every time you latch on to one thought, Pynchon careens off in another direction – but less entertaining. It bears some resemblance to the also-bizarre but less-terrible Orion, You Came And You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan, which was a strange read but one I enjoyed well enough. That was her debut, and if you enjoyed this one I think you may also enjoy the Henehan. I would not be surprised to see Henehan cite Pynchon as an influence.

I hesitate to even describe the plot, thin as it is. It concerns Oedipa Maas, named co-executor of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, and in the process of executing that duty she begins to discover and investigate a possible long-running conspiracy. Kind of. It hardly merits the name. Along the way Oedipa and the other characters will say and do a great many things that don't make any goddamned sense.

Recommended if you hate yourself. It's even worse than all the people writing unbelievably pretentious reviews about it trying to be cutesy.