The Crying of Lot 49 Summary

The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, a disgruntled housewife living in the fictional Northern California suburb of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, as she traces the footsteps of her deceased ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity and begins to uncover a vast conspiracy of renegade mail-carriers called Tristero. At the beginning of the novel, Oedipa receives a letter from Inverarity’s lawyer, Metzger, who explains that Inverarity has died and chose Oedipa to execute his last will and testament. A wealthy businessman who practically owned the sprawling, soulless Los Angeles suburb of San Narciso, Inverarity has left behind a gigantic estate of investments and real estate holdings. Oedipa is baffled: she last heard from Pierce a year ago, when he briefly called, greeted her in several absurd accents, and then hung up.

Oedipa’s husband Wendell “Mucho” Maas comes home and starts complaining about his job as a DJ at the KCUF radio station. Annoyed, Oedipa remembers that Mucho hated his old job as a used car salesman even more. In the middle of the night, Oedipa gets a call from her therapist, Dr. Hilarius, who asks her to take psychedelic drugs as part of an experiment. (She refuses.) In the morning, Oedipa’s lawyer, Roseman, advises her about the will. Oedipa reflects on how isolated she feels in her stagnant marriage and boring suburban life. She feels like Rapunzel, trapped in a tower, unable to escape.

Oedipa drives south to San Narciso, where she rents a room in a dingy motel called Echo Courts. Metzger, who is a stunningly handsome former child actor as well as Inverarity’s lawyer, shows up to her room unannounced. Oedipa and Metzger start drinking and watching Cashiered, an old movie of Metzger’s about a man who takes his young son and dog to fight in World War I. Meanwhile, the local commercials advertise Inverarity’s bizarre business ventures, like Fangoso Lagoons, a canal-filled suburb built especially for scuba divers, and Beaconsfield cigarettes, which have special filters made of bone charcoal.

Metzger goads Oedipa to predict the end of the movie, which starts playing out of order. They begin flirting, and Metzger initiates a game wherein Oedipa gradually undresses. Then, Oedipa goes to the bathroom, where she knocks over a can of aerosol hairspray, sending it flying around and shattering the mirror. Oedipa and Metzger then clumsily have sex while the motel manager, Miles, plays music outside with his Beatles imitation band, the Paranoids, who blow the motel’s power out just as Metzger and Oedipa climax. Once the power comes back on, they return to Cashiered: the protagonists die, as Oedipa predicted. But she breaks down in tears when Metzger mentions that Inverarity thought Oedipa “wouldn’t be easy” to sleep with.

After this, Oedipa begins investigating the mysterious “Tristero system” that soon becomes her overriding obsession. At a bar called The Scope, she meets the rebellious engineer Mike Fallopian, who works for the weapons company Yoyodyne but is also developing an underground postal system in his free time. In the bathroom, Oedipa finds a strange message with a trumpetlike symbol that references a communication system called “WASTE.”

Oedipa, Metzger, and the Paranoids visit Fangoso Lagoons, where they hijack a boat and run into Manny Di Presso, a lawyer-turned-actor who briefly played Metzger on an unsuccessful TV pilot. Di Presso is hiding out from the mafioso Tony Jaguar, who also happens to be suing Pierce Inverarity’s estate. During World War II, some Nazis killed a group of American soldiers in Italy and dumped their bones in the Lago di Pietà. Then, Tony dug up the bones and sold them to Beaconsfield for their bone charcoal cigarettes, but he never got paid. The Paranoids point out that this is exactly like the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy, a 17th-century English play that Oedipa decides to go see.

Full of torture, incest, and revenge plots, The Courier’s Tragedy centers on the rivalry between Squamuglia and Faggio, two duchies in early modern Italy. At the end of the play, masked men attack Niccolò, the heir to Faggio’s throne, who is secretly disguised as a employee of the Thurn and Taxis postal company. Angelo, the Duke of Squamuglia, confesses in a letter to killing Faggio’s soldiers, dumping their bones in a lake, then later digging up the bones and making them into his letter-writing ink. The play is full of awkward silences, which Oedipa thinks must mean something. A character named Gennaro laments Niccolò’s “tryst with Trystero.” After the play, Oedipa approaches Randolph Driblette, who played Gennaro and directed the production. But Driblette tells Oedipa that the play “isn’t literature” and “doesn’t mean anything”—he just stumbled upon the script in Zapf’s Used Books.

Oedipa starts to uncover many more clues about Tristero: at the Yoyodyne offices, she catches an engineer named Stanley Koteks drawing the trumpet signal she saw at The Scope. Koteks tells her about a secret machine invented by a rogue engineer named John Nefastis. Later, at Zapf’s Used Books, Oedipa finds that the script of The Courier’s Tragedy does not include Gennaro’s line about “Trystero.” She meets an elderly man named Mr. Thoth, who shows her a ring with the trumpet symbol that his racist frontiersman grandfather stole from a mail-carrying bandit. And the stamp expert Genghis Cohen tells Oedipa that many of the stamps in Pierce’s collection are complex counterfeits, watermarked with the muted trumpet signal—which is a modification of the original Thurn and Taxis post horn logo. Next, Oedipa drives to Berkeley to visit the publisher of The Courier’s Tragedy and the engineer John Nefastis. The publisher’s older edition also lacks the “Trystero” line. After a rant about entropy, Nefastis tells Oedipa to stare at his machine until it moves. But after an hour, nothing happens. Nefastis hits on Oedipa, who runs out and drives to San Francisco.

Oedipa realizes that Trystero could either be a centuries-long conspiracy or a figment of her imagination. But over the next day, she sees the muted horn symbol everywhere. In a gay bar, she sees it on a man’s lapel pin—but the man explains that it represents the Inamorati Anonymous, a group of voluntarily isolated people who see love as a dangerous addiction that must be cured. Wandering the city and riding the bus all night, Oedipa sees the symbol in shop windows, dreams, children’s songs, sidewalk graffiti, and more. She runs into an old acquaintance, the Mexican anarchist Jesús Arrabal, who views Inverarity as absolute evil personified. And in the morning, Oedipa meets an elderly, alcoholic sailor with a tattoo of the horn symbol and agrees to mail a letter to his estranged wife via a W.A.S.T.E. box under a nearby bridge. Oedipa follows the courier, who retrieves the W.A.S.T.E. mail back across to John Nefastis’s house in Berkeley.

The next day, Oedipa decides to seek advice from Dr. Hilarius, who happens to be locked in his office with a rifle, trying to fend off invisible Israeli soldiers. Hilarius admits that he is an ex-Nazi and has given up on Freudian psychoanalysis. The police capture him, and Oedipa runs into Mucho outside. Mucho awkwardly interviews her for the radio but credits her as “Edna Mosh.” Mucho’s boss, Caesar Funch, warns that Mucho is “losing his identity.” He’s right: Mucho is on Dr. Hilarius’s experimental LSD and cannot tell one person from another.

Oedipa returns to San Narciso, where she learns that Metzger has run off with a younger woman. Oedipa visits Professor Emory Bortz, who wrote the introduction to The Courier’s Tragedy. On the way, she sees that Zapf’s Used Books has burned down. The drunken Bortz mocks her for asking about the different versions of the play, then reveals that Driblette, the local production’s director, recently committed suicide. The Trystero line was only present in a pornographic version of the play written by a Puritan sect called the Scurvhamites, Bortz explains, but there is other evidence for the existence of Trystero, like the memoirs of the English traveler Dr. Diocletian Blobb. Bortz explains that a Spanish man named Hernando Joaquín de Tristero y Calavera allegedly claimed to be the legitimate heir to the Thurn and Taxis postal empire in 1500s, and then Hernando started a rival company to get revenge. Bortz speculates that Tristero could still exist and that it might have participated in events like the French Revolution.

Oedipa grows uninterested in the Tristero conspiracy, which Mike Fallopian thinks Inverarity manufactured to confuse her. While Genghis Cohen uncovers new clues in Inverarity’s stamps, Oedipa also realizes that Pierce owned everything from Zapf’s Used Books to the college where Professor Bortz teaches. Oedipa starts to get sick and drink heavily. She calls the Inamorati Anonymous man from San Francisco and ponders how Inverarity’s wealth can coexist with poverty and desperation in America. All she can do, she realizes, is wait for a miracle to shatter the system.

Oedipa ultimately attends the auction where Inverarity’s stamps will be sold off as lot #49. Genghis Cohen reveals that a secret buyer—possibly from Tristero—signed up to bid at the last minute. Moreover, a prominent auctioneer will be “crying,” or selling off the items. Oedipa sits in the back of the auction hall, looking for the secret bidder, waiting for the titular “the crying of lot 49.”