Oedipa visits him to see the machine after learning about him from Stanley Koteks. He has tried to invent a type of Maxwell's Demon, trying to create a perpetual motion machine. John Nefastis - A scientist obsessed with perpetual motion. Admitting to being a former Nazi doctor at Buchenwald, he holes up in his office, but is taken away peacefuly by the police after Oedipa disarms him. He goes crazy toward the end of the story. Hilarius - Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes LSD, which she does not take, to Oedipa as well as other housewives. They serve as a means of satirizing the southern Californian youth hippie culture in the mid 1960s.ĭr. Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard - The four members of the band called The Paranoids. He has been assigned to help Oedipa execute Pierce's estate. Metzger - A lawyer who works for Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus law firm. Towards the end of the novel, the effects of his nascent LSD use alienate Oedipa. Mucho Maas - The husband of Oedipa, Mucho once worked in a used-car lot but recently became a disc jockey for KCUF radio in Kinneret, California (a fictional town). At the beginning of the novel he is already dead and is said to have been extremely rich, having owned, at one time or another, a great deal of real property and holdings in California.

The reader never meets him directly: all encounters are presented through Oedipa's memories. Pierce Inverarity - Oedipa's ex-boyfriend and a wealthy real-estate tycoon. Oedipa functions in the novel as a type of detective, trying to find out the meaning behind Trystero in the play The Courier's Tragedy.

After her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, names her co-executor of his estate, she discovers and begins to unravel a worldwide conspiracy.

NOTE: You can view the many approaches to The Crying of Lot 49 cover art over time at Characters The cover art is by Milton Charles at Charles and Cuffari.

The crying of lot