Satire and Parody
Late in the novel, Oedipa goes to see her sometime confidante Mike Fallopian. She tells him everything she's discovered about the Tristero since they last met, and he listens patiently. Then he says:
"Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody's putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?" (6.98)
Oedipa admits to herself that the thought has been lurking in the back of her mind, but she refuses to admit it to Fallopian. "No," she says, "That's ridiculous" (6.99).
By this point in the novel, the reader can totally sympathize with Oedipa's predicament. We meticulously trace the plot, track down Pynchon's references, and patiently wait for it all to come together. And yet the whole time we know that the book is pretty much half-hoax. It must be either faith or—as with Oedipa—stubborn denial that keeps us from dismissing the whole thing as a practical joke, throwing the book across the room, and cursing Pynchon for wasting our time.
Lot 49 is a skinny little book, but within it Pynchon manages to parody English pop bands, literary scholarship, California counter-culture, Jacobean Revenge Plays, the American right wing, detective stories, and the corporate culture at a made-up electronics and missile company named Yoyodyne. He makes fun of everyone.
What makes his humor so devastating is that it's somehow believable. Through all of the exaggerations and distortions, we can still recognize the object of parody and think: Man, those John Birch guys just might be that crazy.
Satire was a genre that was exploding around Pynchon's time, with the likes of Joseph Heller's iconic Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet Lot 49 goes a step further than these two books. Pynchon puts even the reader on shaky footing, so that you laugh without ever knowing for sure whether you're in on the joke or you are the joke. Some people are seriously put off by Pynchon's fiction for this very reason. Others recognize that it only pulls us deeper into the story. We can't laugh too hard at Oedipa Maas… because we're just as overwhelmed by all of it as she is.