As with the poetry of John Ashbery, I believe Pynchon to be tremendously gifted, and very technically proficient–yet, ultimately hollow. There are some wonderful things in “Lot” –the description of “The Courier’s Tragedy,” Oedipa’s wanderings around San Francisco, and especially his telling of the founder of IA. But there are moments of extreme boredom, when you feel the weight of his need to be impressive and profound. It is then, when his detail takes a turn away from the funny and the poetic; when it delves into tediousness; that Pynchon loses my interest, and ultimately my fondness for his book. I had the same problem with Vineland, which I never finished. The first fifty pages of that novel were excellent, but then, out of a seeming distrust of telling a somewhat straightforward story he turns into a writer working hard to be weird, difficult, and Joycean. “Lot” would be vastly improved without these breakdowns. Or perhaps the breakdowns are what make Pynchon what he is–namely, not near Nabokov, and not quite Donald Barthelme. Nabokov (whom Pynchon once took an English class from at Cornell) spins his stories on a circle, and runs circles around Pynchon’s formidable prose. Conversely, “Lot” seems lost, with every layer of Oedipa’s correspondence randomly arriving and then fanning out–with more than the occasional strand never being heard from again. Barthelme, meanwhile, hits all the same notes as TP, but does it with a relaxed air and a readability that makes one long for him while enduring the final 49 pages of this novel. I will say, however, that Pynchon can be wonderfully poetic at times, and his sense of humor is often charming. “Lot” certainly deserves a rereading, owing to its difficulty, and I, too, admit to being lost at times with its Trystero quest. But I was so bored with the back part of the book that I wonder if I’ll ever make it through a second time.