2 - The Crying of Lot 49 and other California novels

Summary

Though The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990) and Inherent Vice (2009) are all set in California, each is a parable of the American nation. Together they form a mini social and political history of the culture as it devolved from an era of myriad social changes and expanding opportunities to one of conservative reaction. Each book is set specifically in Southern California: Oedipa travels south to San Narciso, while the generative action in both Vineland and Inherent Vice takes place in (or near) Gordita Beach (a.k.a. Manhattan Beach in South Bay). Thus in Pynchon's imagination Southern California is the place where the nation impinges upon the characters of his novels, the place in which his characters begin to think about their lives within the framework of the nation, as Oedipa does near the end of Lot 49 when she walks down a “stretch of railroad track” and realizes “she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic,” that America itself is “coded in Inverarity's testament.” A search drives the plot of all three novels: for Trystero in Oedipa's case, for Prairie's mother Frenesi in Vineland, and in Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello's pursuit of Mickey Wolfmann and Coy Harlingen, among others.