Editing The Crying of Lot 49 (section)

==Critical reception==
Critics have read the book as both an "exemplary [[postmodernism|postmodern]] text" and a [[parody]] of postmodernism.<ref name="castillo">Castillo, Debra A. "[[Jorge Luis Borges|Borges]] and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symmetries of Art", in ''New Essays'', ed. Patrick O'Donnell, pp. 21–46 (Cambridge University Press: 1992). {{ISBN|0-521-38833-3}}.</ref><ref name="bennett">Bennett, David. "Parody, Postmodernism and the Politics of Reading", ''Critical Quarterly'' 27, No. 4 (Winter 1985): pp. 27–43.</ref> Contemporary reviews were mixed, with many critics comparing it unfavourably to Pynchon's first novel ''[[V.]]''. A reviewer in [[Time (magazine)|''Time'']] described the novel as "a metaphysical thriller in the form of a pornographic comic strip".<ref>O'Donnell, Patrick, Introduction ''New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49'', Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 7</ref> In a positive ''[[The New York Times]]'' review, Richard Poirier wrote "Pynchon's technical virtuosity, his adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat – these evidences of extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves in the second".<ref>Poirier, Richard [https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Embattled Underground] The New York Times, 1 May 1966</ref>

===Self-reception===
Pynchon described, in the prologue to his 1984 collection ''[[Slow Learner]]'', an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of ''The Crying of Lot 49'', "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then".<ref name="slowlearner">Pynchon, Thomas R. Introduction to ''Slow Learner'' (Boston: Little, Brown: 1984). {{ISBN|0-316-72442-4}}.</ref>