Character Analysis
Mystery Man
This guy doesn't actually show up in the novel—he's dead before the action starts—but without him this novel would just be about a housewife in the Bay Area married to a DJ.
Pierce Inverarity is Oedipa's ex-boyfriend, who became a super-rich California real estate mogul. He dies before the book begins, and for mysterious reasons chooses to leave Oedipa in charge of executing his estate. We only catch glimpses of Inverarity through Oedipa's memories, and through the recollections of others. Also, even though Inverarity is deader than a doornail at the beginning of the book, his crazy-vast property holdings make it seem as though he is everywhere.
As Oedipa thinks in a moment of exasperation: "What the hell didn't he own?" (2.88).
The memories we get of Inverarity are less than flattering. He was a weird, weird guy. Oedipa remembers a time that he called her in the middle of the night and spoke in a series of different accents, from Slavic to "comic-Negro," (um, way to be racist) and then finally in "his Lamont Cranston voice" (Lamont Cranston was one of the alter egos on the popular radio show The Shadow) (1.2). We later learn that Inverarity discussed his relationship with Oedipa with Metzger, and grossly predicted that the two of them would get it on while executing his estate.
What else do we know about Inverarity? Well, he bought the bones of American GIs to be used in cigarette filters, he inspired a Mexican anarchist to a lifetime of revolt since he was "exactly and without flaw the thing we fight" (4.88). Basically, Inverarity comes across as an amoral businessman, and as super self-absorbed and stuck-up.
By the end of the novel, Oedipa realizes that everything that relates to the Tristero conspiracy is in one way or another tied to Inverarity's estate. She begins to consider the fact that maybe Inverarity is simply playing an elaborate practical joke on her… but she can never decide for sure.
In a lot of ways, the reader is in the exact same position to the author as Oedipa is to Inverarity. We are left to wonder if there really is something in Tristero or if it's all just smoke and mirrors and some dude with a kind of sick sense of humor.
Inverarity's name suggests many things, including "inverity" (or "untruth") and "in variety." While executing his estate, Oedipa struggles to "pierce" the untruths surrounding Tristero, and at the same time feels as if she gets lost in the variety of references to the conspiracy, in the confused maze that is Pierce Inverarity's estate.