The Crying of Lot 49

Summary

Suburban California housewife Oedipa Maas is named executor of a former lover's vast estate and, while sorting through his affairs, stumbles onto what may be evidence of a centuries old underground postal conspiracy called the Tristero, or may be nothing more than her own unraveling mind. Pynchon compresses his taste for paranoid conspiracy and encyclopedic digression into a compact, hallucinatory novella that never resolves whether Oedipa has uncovered a secret history or invented one. The book became a touchstone of American postmodern fiction despite its brevity.