In May 1966, Richard Poirier wrote an article about Thomas Pynchon's novel, The Crying of Lot 49. Clearly a fan of Pynchon's previous work, V, Poirier praises this he calls another example of Pynchon's "technical virtuosity" and "apocalyptic satire", of "Saturnalian inventiveness" comparable to John Barth and Joseph Heller (Poirier 1). He admires Pynchon's deep confidence with philosophical and psychological concepts, "his anthropological intimacy with the unusual" (1). Before addressing what he believes to be flaws in the author's narrative (the core of the scope of his opinions), Poirier begins with a broad overview of Pynchon's intentions regarding the form. Poirier suggests that the various intertwining quests of the protagonist Oedipa Maas are willfully crafted to reflect the complexities of the mind, a wasteland of suspicion and imagination. The imagination of the characters in the novel "first creates and then is a slave to its own plots, to its machines" (1). Toward the end of the novel, as connections to the Tristero cult accumulate, Oedipa wanders the dense environs of nocturnal San Francisco, stunned by her imagination (or was it?) of the subterranean symbol: "The profusion of posthorns of this night, malicious, deliberate replication. one by one, pinch by precision, they were immobilizing her" (Pynchon 124). Like the characters in V, Oedipa Maas runs away from the responsibilities of love and finds herself in a labyrinth. Pynchon mocks these “loveless” situations with “byzantine plot complications” (Poirier 1). As for Pynchon's characters, Poirier also notes their desperate efforts to communicate. Pynchon has an extraordinary metaphorical ability that illustrates his veneration for the human effort to encode, decode and leave messages, to communicate; his own cry for the pathetic and disturbing inability to communicate. Finally, Poirier states that the most important character throughout The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon himself, whose voice moves passionately "with its ability to move from elegy to epic catalogue... like a survivor looking through the piled rubble of this civilization" (5). Works Cited Poirier, Richard. "Underground battlement." New York Times on the Web May 1, 1966. September 22, 2000. Pynchon, Thomas. The Cry of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.