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From Christoph Gielen and Geoff Manaugh, The New York Times
In his novel “The Crying of Lot 49,” Thomas Pynchon describes a suburb that is “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts — census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.” The novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, “looks down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth,” Pynchon writes, “and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.” The architectural system unfolding in front of her held, according to Pynchon, a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.”
