The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I’ve been meaning to read Pynchon for a while now, and stumbling across The Crying of Lot 49 in the library, I decided to start with one of his shorter novels. Showing a complete lack of culture on my part of any kind, I came to the conclusion that I had made a wise decision. The book, I enjoyed immensely (any novel that describes the violent finale of a Jacobean revenge play as like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse is worth reading for that line alone) but Pynchon’s prose is so dense, and the avalanche of ideas so unrelenting, that it is entirely unsuited for the commute to work by train and its attendant bouts of motion induced narcolepsy.

Back to the story: The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, former lover of Pierce Inverarity, who has just died and rather inconsiderately named her as joint executor of his will. Leaving behind her disk jockey husband, Waldo ‘Mucho’ Maas, at their home in Kinneret, CA, she drives south to San Narciso, where Pierce had extensive business dealings. Checking into a motel, she is surprised by the arrival of her co-executor, a lawyer called Metzger, who has brought a bottle of wine with him.

He turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first that They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor. He stood at her door, behind him the oblong swimming pool shimmering silent in a mild diffusion of light from the night-time sky, saying, “Mrs Maas,” like a reproach. His enormous eyes, lambent, extravagantly lashed, smiled out at her wickedly; she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling, but there was only himself and a debonair bottle of French Beaujolais, which he claimed to’ve smuggled last year into California, this rollicking lawbreaker, past the frontier guards. “So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in, can’t I?” Oedipa had planned on nothing more involved that evening than watching Bonanza on the tube. She shifted into stretch denim slacks and a shaggy black sweater, and had her hair all the way down. She knew she looked pretty good. “Come in,” she said, “But I only have one glass.” “I,” the gallant Metzger let her know, “can drink out of the bottle.”

Actually, Metzger is an actor, or he was once. One of his films is being shown on the television that night, back from the days when he was a child star. He tries to explain the plot of Cashiered, but the reels are being played in the wrong order and Oedipa is having trouble keeping up:

“But,” began Oedipa, then saw how they were suddenly out of wine. “Aha,” said Metzger, from inside a coat pocket producing a bottle of tequila. “No lemons?” she asked, with movie-gaiety. “No salt?” “A tourist thing. Did Inverarity use lemons when you were there?”

All this booze is bound to lead to horseplay, and Oedipa and Metzger embark on an affair. It’s the first of many peculiar happenings as Oedipa discovers that Inverarity’s legacy is proof of an alternative mail service called Tristero, locked in a centuries long conflict with Thurn & Taxis, the first official mail courier of Europe. Finding the muted trumpet logo of Tristero all over California, Oedipa believes that she is on the verge of uncovering an enormous conspiracy. Of course, it could just be an elaborate hoax, or even a product of Oedipa’s over analysed mind...

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

The surprise winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Vernon God Little is a riotous satire of adolescence, death, crime and punishment in small-town Texas.

The protagonist, Vernon Little, has somehow managed to get himself into a world of shit without trying. His best friend Jesus Navarro, has shot the rest of his class and Vernon is under suspicion as an accessory, or worse still, an accomplice. His dysfunctional teenage life is now under intense scrutiny giving everything he does a air of perceived delinquency.

When he gets sent to a sinister psychiatrist, he decides the best thing to do is go on the lam to Mexico with Taylor Figueroa, a girl with whom he is besotted. Money, however, is a bit of an issue. In fact, he has none, so he decides to get drunk and think about things. Still, the barter economy is alive and well in Martirio; beer can be exchanged for online pornography with local amputee Silas:

“We-ell,” he says, stroking his chin. “How much ya want fer it?” “A case.” “Git outta here.” “No kidding, Sie, this list can save you a truckload of beer over the summer. A goddam truckload, at least.” “I’ll pay a six pack.” “We-ell,” I hesitate. You have to hesitate with Silas. “We-ell. I don’t know, Sie, plenty of kids’ll wanna kill me, after I bust the business like this.” “Six-packa Coors, I’ll go git it.” He swings a way into the house like a one legged monkey. You can’t drink until you’re twenty-one around here. I ain’t twenty-one. Good ole Silas always keeps some brews in stock, to trade for special pictures. Us Martirio kids are like his personal internet. He’s our personal bar. By seven thirty this morning, I’m sat in a dirt clearing behind some bushes at Keeter’s sucking beer and waiting for ideas about cash.

He finally pulls off a scheme for getting enough bucks together and manages to get to Mexico where he hitches a lift with a truck driver. Flat broke, he hasn’t even got enough for a drink.

A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say ‘Milk and fucken cookies’ in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit’s established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle. “Sa- lud!” he says.

After which, things get a little messy:

Don’t fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider’s web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I’m loaded off my ass... An aneurism wakes me Friday morning. I’m curled up on the floor behind a table. A brick in my head smashes into the back of my eyes when I look around.

Having traded the last of his possessions and the clothes he stood in for a night on the tiles, he’s once again desperate for money. Can he persuade Taylor to come down to Mexico with the money. You betcha! Especially if he starts talking to her as if he really did commit all those murders. She takes him to a hotel room and they raid the mini-bar:

“Welcome home,” she says. She pulls some tequila minatures out of the mini-bar, while I just stand here like a spare prick, then she curls up on the bed closest to the window... Taylor raises her bottle, and we slug our tequilas down. I lie back on the bed like I’m wearing guns. She crawls half off the bed to grab some beers, and as she does it, her ass strains into the air. Panty-line. Bikinis. I’m fucken slain.

All this drink and physical temptation. Young Vern couldn’t be being set up to say something foolish might he?

Trix by Stephanie Theobald

Another road-trip across the US, this time from Florida to California, in the company of the volatile and unpredictable Ruby Rose, small time hustler, dominatrix and California courtesan...

Shy and uptight Mo is on holiday from Scarborough when she runs into Ruby in a New Orleans diner and is equally captivated and appalled by her. At six foot and fifteen stone, Ruby is larger than life in more than one sense, with an interesting taste in drinks, Mo notes, as a jug of fizzy stuff the colour of the ocean in Biloxi appears:

She pours a slug of Jack Daniel’s into her glass, followed by some of the yellowy brown liquid. “Damn climate,” she says, “God’s punishment for country music.” She takes a swig and bangs the glass down on the counter, panting. “Jack Daniel’s and root beer: best drink in the world.”

Agreeing to give her a lift to New Mexico, Mo finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed by her new friend, a woman with an insatiable thirst for food, drink, drugs and sex. She is also beginning to wonder if Ruby isn’t in fact bonkers. In the darkness of a power cut, Ruby starts on the sauce again:

Another match is struck. The blackness shrinks back to reveal a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a brown and orange can. An ear of flame appears from a hand on the bed. “Are you mad?” “So I’ve been told,” she says, with a ripple of laughter... “Once, I set fire to three acres of hillside,” she says, taking a swig from the Jack Daniel’s bottle and slashing another match.

Beneath her chaotic exterior, Ruby is hiding deep and terrible secrets, which are slowly coming to the surface in a haze of whiskey and marijuana. Between drinking bouts she scribbles a memoir of her troubled childhood in a diary and Mo cannot help sneaking a read. Their arrival in small town New Mexico sees them at a tiny motel run by the sexagenarian Vera who at least is up for a glass of something herself:

Vera looks pleased to see us. “Good to see you girls made it!” she says, thumping the bar. She asks us what we’d like to drink and Billie orders tequila for both of us... “Let’s get really hammered?” Billie says, to nobody in particular, slugging back her tequila. “You go, girl!” Vera says, downing her whiskey in a few gulps. “They say that the beginning’s one half of the deed.”

While a drunken and shocked Mo contemplates what she has read in Ruby’s diary, he friend is coaxed into performing her burlesque of Doris Day/Courtney Love. Truly unhinged, it’s Ruby’s tour de force, complete with stage props of fake drugs and a bottle of vodka:

She wraps the pink dress around her hurriedly and carries on lip-synching ‘Que Sera Sera’, mouthing sweetly about what she’s going to do when she grows up. And then it comes again: the music rips savagely into Courtney Love and the deranged, twisted Doris comes back to life. She gulps down the rest of the vodka, she chucks a handful of Valium down her neck, she tears open the cocaine envelope, throws the contents all over her face and cleavage, then rips off the dolls head and pulls out the day-glo red and blue brains with such frenzy that I’m not sure this is play acting any more. I think that maybe she’s gone completely off the rails and as the Love music becomes slower she takes the vodka bottle and licks the rim suggestively, ominously... The only thing that keeps coming back to me is the line from the Doris Day song when the little girl asks her mother what the future holds. And I want to cry but I can’t do that or I’ll give the game away. So I drink. I drink and drink.

With still two states to drive through before they reach the Pacific Ocean, none of this augurs well...

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

"He had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," said Christopher Robin Milne of his father, author of Winnie the Pooh, which is a good point of reference for the poisonous legacy of the Hayseed Chronicles featuring Mr Toppit, the book within a book in Charles Elton’s debut.

Arthur Hayman has published five books in the Chronicles but is killed (run over by a cement truck in Soho) just as the sinister presence in the books, Mr Toppit – a sort of diabolical counterpart to Enid Blyton’s Mr Pink Whistle – emerges from the Darkwood in their final paragraph.

His son, Luke, immortalised as Luke Hayseed both in print and the ridiculous illustrations by the family German teacher, Lila, narrates most of the book with an icy detachment, his way of coping with the sudden fame incurred by the books becoming a posthumous publishing phenomenon thanks to Laurie Clow, a DJ on a hospital radio station in California.

Five years after his father’s death, Luke is at a party the night before he goes to America to visit Laurie, now a chat show host in LA. The books have bought the family great wealth, but it’s a tainted legacy. His sister Rachel, who invites him round, is drug addled and neurotic. Still, the rest of the guests are an entertaining mix of foreigners, actors and a priest:

Although it was summer and still light outside, the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by candles. There was a peculiar smell that Claude said was church incense. “The best, the very best,” he said. “I nicked it from All Saints, Margaret Street.” The priest laughed so much that he knocked over the jug that contained the special cocktail Claude had made with vodka and blue Curaçao.

Rachel flees the party and Luke finds her downstairs:

She handed me a bottle of clear liquid. “What is it?” “Grappa. It’s made from all the grape crap left behind after they’ve done the wine. Claude loves it. It’s Italian. Don’t’ drink it all.” The grappa seemed to avoid my stomach and go straight to my head so when Rachel came back I was feeling a bit dizzy.

The party carries on into street and finishes with a police caution for all involved. Still, it’s a fairly abstemious evening compared to a night out in California when Luke ends up visiting Travis, one of Laurie’s staff, late at night. He’s with Merry, the daughter of Laurie’s friends. She’s also cutting up lines of coke and knocking back the tequila:

She showed me how they had been drinking the tequila. You put some salt on the back of your hand, licked it off, took a big swig, then sucked a lime quarter. Its sharpness made me shiver as the tequila went down.

And then the toot kicks in:

I was trying to concentrate. Of course, nothing happened instantly. I’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner and then there had been the tequila so I knew I was a bit drunk, but the odd thing was that gradually my head cleared. When you’re drunk you get a bit sluggish but suddenly the blood was moving round my body more efficiently. In a while I could feel every pulse inside me working in unison, like those oilfields you see with the pumps going up and down like crazy. The next time we combined it with tequila. Slug of drink, lick of salt, suck lime, snort line.

Needless to say, all this hellraising is going to come to bad end and Luke finds himself compromised, to say the least. But then again, the misfortune is spread around equally. As the Chronicles themselves say:

And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.