Just finished a reread of the crying of lot 49. If it wasn't so short Id put it right up there with GR, hard to believe I was so non plussed the first time. Some stray thoughts:
Chapter 5 (Oedipa gets drunk, wanders San Fransisco and ends with a psychotic Dr. Hilarious) was as good as anything Pynchon has ever put to paper. Also felt like a trial run for the toilet scene in GR.
Seems the book makes careful attempts to hint at Frued, Jung, and Lacan, in that order, corresponding with the begging, middle and end of the book. I don't know how Jung fits in here, but if Freud was the start of the psychoanalytic practice that looks only inward for diagnosis, the family unit with no consideration for ideological constructs, then Lacan's mirror stage (in part how Pynchon alludes to Lacan) works handily as a metaphor for the society that Pynchon is describing, one where individuals can only interpret the world through the image of the self (....echo courts, San Narciso). We also know Lacan was a big part of Bleeding Edge.
Think paranoia is handled in way not present in his other works, or at least not in a way I've picked up on. Here its that an increasingly homogenized population is as cause for the paranoia as an over load of information. Its the tendency for doubles, repetition and imitation and the corresponding coincidences that suggest the sinister master plan. Its paranoia by way of the banal. In this way C49 is styled as much like Updike as it is Burroughs. This is Pynchon's lampoon on the white picket fence.
He really shows his cards in the final pages. Practically says that its the unchecked privatization of everything that's at the heart of the problem. Inherent Vice is the only other book that summarizes itself so neatly in conclusion. And stylistically, might be P's slickest ending, thought it was fantastic. By revealing the double meaning of 'cries' right before the auctioneer climbs on stage, P throws the scene into triangular symmetry with the 'DT' and Maxwell's Demon passages from earlier. Putting that together as the auctioneer assumes the position on stage is like discovering the identity of the killer just before he plunges the knife in your back. The novel has a subtle apocalyptic tone and the ending caps that off accordingly with just the slightest peak behind the curtain.
Whats up with the rarely mentioned, but often enough and too obtuse to be accidental, pedophilia theme? Maybe its mentioned before, but its made explicit in the back half of the novel: Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch of kids dancing some kind of a Watusi. "I like to watch young stuff," he explained. "There's something about a little chick that age."/ "So does my husband," she said. "I understand." This exchange comes out of nowhere and is immediately moved on from; in a book that dwells on everything this reads like a conspicuous little flag from the author. It comes up again a few times after the fact, most notabley when Metzger runs off with that 15 year old. Think its an American Beauty/Lolita thing- the book riffing on the archetypal 50's America, and the sad 1950's man becoming infatuated with a pre teen is an archetype itself. I know nothing about why this is though.
GR-C49-Inherent Vice-V-Against the Day-Bleeding Edge is my rank, but the last three you could call a tie. Still need to read Vineland and Mason and Dixon. And probably need to reread AtD, fantastic stretches in that book but it lost me at a point.