Crying of lot 49 Ending (also from whence I was sick)

The ending of The Crying of Lot 49 was less satisfying than the whirl the novel had brought me on. 

So very much was loaded into the first 5 chapters, and I thought myself diligent for keeping close-track of all of the tangential plot lines and oddly-named characters, but really I was a fool. I should have simply appreciated them for what they were, and the spontaneous value they brought to the novel at any given moment, as opposed to lulling myself into a grand illusion (great Styx album by the way. Fun fact: I sang background at a Styx concert). 

Anyway, Fallopian informs us in this chapter by that Pierce was literally just trolling our narrator for the bulk of the mystery. He has some weird thing for messing with her, I guess. But we do find out that WASTE stands for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." But this Tristero plot line is irrelevant because everything leads back to Pierce's holdings. 

Lastly, the actual ending defies the key element of mystery: the wrap-up. The ultimate troll from Pynchon. Near the very end of the story, Genghis Cohen introduces a mysterious bidder on Pierce's mysterious stamp collection. For a final time, I am tricked into thinking this will be the plot line that brings about a clean conclusion. And once again I am wrong. This leads to nothing, and the ending of the book is precisely this leading to nothing. It is a real shame. I would try to read into it, but honestly I think this move by Pynchon took the mystery, out of the story. 

This book is charming on its own and has never-ending potential, but unfortunately it never concludes with the necessary mechanism of all good mysteries- a conclusive ending that makes us go "ohhhhhhh." For that reason, it was a bit of a let-down.