Davenport unlocks his word hoard--peering through cracks, we have already seen hints of its riches: chirr, besom, peplum, and pinguid . He begins to elucidate a surprisingly romantic and inspiring utopianism, and, inextricable from that utopia, he begins to show us people--sometimes young people, sometimes, yes, children--who are freely and gleefully sexual.

So much is outrageously good about The Crying of Lot 49: the pitch-perfect parody of the seventeenth-century drama, The Courier's Tragedy, at its center; the great constellation of conspiracy theorists who variously beset the protagonist Oedipa Maas, like the members of Inamorati Anonymous and the Peter Pinguid Society; and, of course, the fascinating and intensely complicated use of thermodynamic and informational entropy that undergirds much of the novel's action.