Crying of Lot 49

"Thomas Pynchon's second novel, 'The Crying of Lot 49', reads like an episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed 'V.', published three years ago. 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. And the uses to which he puts them are very much the same.Pynchon, Thomas is the author of 'Crying of Lot 49', published 1999 under ISBN 9780060931674 and ISBN 0060931671.