V. is a difficult book. Which is appropriate, seeing as how I basically read it as practice for a forthcoming Gravity's Rainbow buddy read, also somewhat infamous for its difficulty, or at least for its experience and the commitment necessary to tackle it. In any case, it was difficult. Pynchon yanks you around like a yo-yo on a string, taking you through world-history you may or may not be familiar with, introducing you to characters you may or may not need to remember (and so many!), displaying the casual breadth of knowledge by which his stories are created. It's daunting at times. And to think that this was a debut novel, written by a twenty-five year old, is not just shocking but intimidating. And so while it was not the easiest read, it was also, more often than not, brilliant.
I mean, who writes at this level from the beginning of their career? It's the type of stuff you could read five times and still scoff at the idea of "total comprehension". It's just full. Nothing is by accident. He plays with form and structure in ways that make you feel less pretentious about using the term postmodern, because reading this, and picturing someone reading it in 1963, one gets the sense that Pynchon was, and probably still is, in a league of his own.
He relishes in mystery and grand conspiracy. Enigma. Obsession. He explores the entropic slide into decadence within society; within the human heart, and the inhuman as well. Recurrent mechanistic imagery. The Kingdom of Death, and of Life. Dream streets, and what lies beneath them. To pin him down thematically seems as fruitless as Stencil's "mad time-search" for the woman V., but you get the sense that each connection within the text is woven subtly, with care. There is so much here that it feels hard to even describe, or "review", because so much of the book is... So much of it is detailed foreign politics and espionage. It is art heists and Navy brawls. Small-skirmish military history and alligator hunts through the New York sewer system. There's late-nineteenth-century anarchism. There are plastic surgeons, soul-dentists, and war pilots. There are a multitude of projections, impersonations, and paranoia. It's just— It's weird! It's Pynchon, man.
And is it without flaw? No. A debut novel is a debut novel, no matter how excellently crafted. And a modern reader will likely squirm at some of his writing of female characters. But it is a look inside the mind of someone who is responsible for some of the most compelling literature we can display.
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After launching a flotilla of rubber duckies into my bath I was arranging them in a flying wedge formation when I noticed a water drop encased ant slide down my shower wall as if it was the inventor of some new form of locomotion and was proudly speedily on its way. Later dry and dressed I grabbed a book and sat outside on the back porch to enjoy the evening air. An orange sunset was winking out over the horizon and it seemed to have left shards of itself scattered in the adjacent pumpkin field. The book was V. by Thomas Pynchon and I began reading about a great amoebalike boy Benny Profane who chased alligators in the New York sewers and clownish Herbert Stencil who chased V. capering along behind her, bells ajingle. I lit a cigarette and as I puffed away I imagined the pulsing coal at the butt end as a lighthouse lamp at dusk guiding lost porch sitters into safety. Too dark to continue reading I closed the book and being a fan of minimalist titles I looked at the V. on the cover and mused about what finally might have happened to the mysterious lady. Perchance V. became inanimate and now graces some Maltese plaza as a mystery statue of Venus or possibly manifesting her inanimation as a painting she became a Jean Fouquet Madonna sans infant one breast exposed anyway but not a diptych this time around or maybe she took a wrong subterranean turn and was eaten by one of Profane's big albino sewer gators? Perhaps we need not worry about V. in any of her manifestations. "So it came about that God wore a wide-awake hat and fought skirmishes with an aboriginal Satan out at the antipodes of the firmament, in the name and for the safekeeping of any Victoria.” Peering off into the gloaming I saw distant lightning flickering continuously behind clouds and it looked like someone had found a rip in the fabric of the universe and was trying to weld it quickly closed.
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