Exactly how steamy is this story?
R
In Pynchon's world, sex is weird, weird, weird. If you don't believe us, just read up through the end of Chapter Two when Metzger and Oedipa begin their affair. Metzger thinks he has convinced Oedipa to play a stripping game, but then she slips into the bathroom and puts on every piece of clothing she can find until she looks like "a beach ball with feet" (2.78). When she finally agrees to have sex with Metzger, it takes him so long to take off her clothes that she falls asleep several times—only to wake up in the middle of the act. Like we said: deeply weird. And kind of rape-y.
Metzger's not alone. The vast majority of the men in Pynchon's books are sex-crazed lunatics. Mucho Maas, John Nefastis, Mike Fallopian, and Metzger are all sexually interested in young girls. For someone reading the book in 1966, their obsessions would bring to mind one thing: Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita. Nabokov's book is about a (deeply creepy) affair between a middle-aged man and a pre-pubescent girl, and it caused a national uproar when it was released. The themes of Lolita are re-enacted and parodied in Pynchon's work (Pynchon studied under Nabokov at Cornell), and what was so taboo only a decade before is now treated as if it were mainstream.
The most direct parody can be seen after the middle-aged lawyer Metzger runs off with the girlfriend of Serge, the counter-tenor in the Paranoids. Serge sings a song about all these "Humbert Humbert cats" (the man in Lolita is named Humbert Humbert), but Serge also says that he has learned something from Metzger (6.4). Like Metzger, Serge will begin pursuing younger girls, and he tells Oedipa that he has been hanging around playgrounds trying to pick up eight-year-olds. Being Pynchon, it's a dark and twisted joke, but we think Pynchon is also onto something here.
Pynchon was writing in the midst of the sexual revolution, when everyone was supposed to be liberated from the sexual mores of the past, and casual sex had become mainstream. What's very clear in Lot 49 (and in much of Pynchon's other work) is that the so-called "liberation" was grossly lopsided. Men could sleep with whomever they wanted and enact all their perverse fantasies… but a nice housewife like Oedipa Maas hardly lived in a sexual paradise. She was often the victim of male sexual desires and hardly ever got to express any of her own.