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Editorial Review Product Description
The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men--one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose--and "V.," the unknown woman of the title.Amazon.com Review
Having just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content tolead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition isto perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where"responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the WholeSick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other thancheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dramatically when he befriendsStencil, an active ambitious young man with an intriguing mission--to findout the identity of a woman named V., who knew Stencil's father during thewar, but who suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. ... Read more Customer Reviews (86) 
Try, trying, tried.....
This was my third attempt at reading V and finishing a novel that "everyone"
calls a classic. I got about a third done and I still didn't care at all about
any of the characters nor did I intend to spend hours of my lifetime trying again.
So I put it down for the last time.
Complexity Cubed
Undeniably, there are so many moments of gleeful genius to be found amidst the yo-yo mechanics being engineered in V., but there are equal parts tech manual of automated history regurgitation. Moments where the two blur seamlessly together suggest how masterful a writer Pynchon is at his best, while at his worst his writing, though stylistically still impressive, is impenetrable.
Reading the back cover or jacket copy of V. may suggest some semblance of a plot, but that simply isn't the case. A co-worker of mine saw my copy on my desk while I had stepped away, and upon my return, said she was interested in a good mystery, did I recommend? I nearly slapped the book out of her hand, as any such attempt might turn her off reading permanently. Make no mistake here though: for the properly equipped adventurer, this is an unforgettable exploration into literary chaos and is unlike most anything I've read. For those attempting and struggling, spelunk on without your map, the tight squeezes are treacherous, but you'll get through to the end and enjoy the wide open expanses.
The three star rating is meant to represent both the initiated and not. I'd love to give this novel five stars, because I really did enjoy most of it and appreciated all, but V. is simply not accessible to the bulk of the reading population, and I don't just mean that they may not like it, I mean they won't be able to read it at all, sadly, to no fault of their own.
Living with and without imaginative power in the 20th century
Pynchon creates three overlapping worlds in V. The first features Benny Profane, a beer-bellied slacker in the mid 1950's, who stays in touch with his navy buddies while he lives in Manhattan, hunts alligators in the sewers, and drinks heavily with a young intellectual crowd that talks only in proper nouns. His second world features Sidney Stencil, a British spy who vanished in 1919, and his son Herbert, who was born in 1901 and relentlessly seeks the story of his father's death. The Pynch's third world is articulated most clearly by Fausto Maijstral, a poet born in 1919 who tells stories of love and guilt in a long lyrical letter (and confession) to his daughter.
At some point, each of these characters is affected by Victoria Wren, a British woman (born in 1880) who is drawn to espionage, sadomasochistic sex, and sexual fetishes. While their connections to Victoria--that is, V.--range from comical and weird (Benny sees her mad influence in the sewers) to profound (Fausto witnesses her death), V. has the greatest effect on the intensely imaginative Herbert Stencil, who has dedicated his life to learning about V. and her interaction with his father. This search for V. is the heartbeat in Pynchon's book.
In writing V., the Pynch creates a sharp contrast between the slacker world of Benny Profane and imaginative worlds of the Stencils and the poet Maijstral. In making this contrast, Pynchon shows a world of superficial and arbitrary affiliation for Benny, which is a not-inaccurate rendering of life for people living extended adolescences. (Believe me; I know.) Meanwhile, the worlds of the Stencils and Maijstral are beautiful, deep, and subtle, although the practical Sidney Stencil, a spy, is focused on finding the pattern in events that may or may not threaten British interests. Regardless, the many chapters featuring the perspectives of these characters are fascinating and show great imaginative power.
At the same time, Pynchon threads all his chapters with a single theme: inanimate objects and their capacity to enter our imaginations. At times, the effects of the inanimate in V. are harmless and familiar. The character Rachel, for example, is enamored with her sports car. At other times, the imaginative power of inanimate objects warps the mind, with V. finding self-destructive uses for cosmetic surgery and prosthetics. This fascination with inanimate objects also leads to what is another's character's suicide or murder. Only Benny is immune from this power.
V. is Pynchon's first novel. But is it the best place to start reading the fiction of this truly talented writer? Well, many Pynchoneers will disagree. But, I'd start with Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin), where the Pynch's playfulness, mastery of form, concern with family, and awareness of the dark side are easily accessible, as well as sometimes hilarious. Next, I'd try Mason & Dixon: A Novel, which, in my reading, weaves together 78 short stories, many of them masterworks, creating a narrative about a meaningful friendship (and everything else). Then, I'd read the books on whim, using Inherent Vice: A Novel, Pynchon's mystery featuring a doper PI, as a change of pace. You can't miss with any of these novels (although I must say that Pynchon makes more of his slacker characters in his later books).
Regardless, V., which published in 1963, remains completely fresh and imaginatively engaging and is highly recommended.
"The ultimate Plot Which Has No Name"
This debut's strong if not a knockout. I liked its ambition, but compared to "Against the Day" nearly 45 years later, for instance, or even the recent "Inherent Vice" (see my reviews), this satisfies as a shaggy-dog tale but does not overwhelm me with its power. But, he wasn't even 25 when this bold book was published in 1961. Pynchon improved in crafting intellectual thrillers full of global conspiracies, cartoonish characters, flashes of inspired prose, and dense allusions you have to look up. These elements all exist in "V.", so it's valuable to watch them bloom. But, they often dazzle for briefer periods, before the plot veers away and its caricatured figures (few of whom manage to stick with you) recede into the distance.
Distancing does diffuse Pynchon's power. For all of their detail, the Whole Sick Crew whir past as if stick drawings in an animated film. There's an accelerated pace to this narrative crammed full of digressions and shenanigans. Granted, some chapters amass enough obsessively compiled data (how Esther gets her nose job's described in clinical, precise language), weird scenes (Father Fairing's mission to the rats) or horrific settings (South-West Africa after WWI); other events such as the siege of Malta in WWII or the attempted theft of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" for all their bulk don't leave as much of an impression. Still, as in the passages I cite, the writing suddenly rises to its potential.
The book spins two gradually intertwined storylines. Benny Profane and the Sick Crew disembark from the Navy in dock and pal around the East Coast in Beat style, circa 1956. Here he thinks of his sometime lover, Rachel Owlglass, my favorite character, sketchy as she stays. "She visited him occasionally, as now, by night, like a succubus, coming in with the snow. There was no way he knew to keep her out." (30; Modern Library 1966 ed.) Profane eventually makes his way to Malta.
To there, Herbert Stencil early in the last century pursues the enigmatic title character "V." He tells one of her guises about the strange Arctic realm of Vheiss (similar to the pursuit of Shambhala in "Against the Day"): "As if you lived inside a madman's kaleidoscope. Even your dreams become flooded with colors, with shapes no Occidental ever saw. Not real shapes, not meaningful ones. Simply random, the way clouds change over a Yorkshire landscape." (170)
For "V." in Florence, Victoria Wren, at that moment of diversion as the theft's attempted, it was "as if she saw herself embodying a feminine principle, acting as complement to all this bursting, explosive male energy. Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasms of wounded bodies, the fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone in that tiny square. From her hair the heads of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than she." (209)
Later, regarding her latest incarnation as Victoria: "If she was an historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment, because the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name was as yet unrealized, although V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation." (226)
The embedded tales of African terror, Maltese assault, and New York subway oddness with albino alligator hunts do serve to break up the crazy zig-zag of the plot as it is. They show Pynchon's love of invention, one of his most endearing qualities. Sections approach poetic profundity.
"Why use the room as an introduction to an apologia? Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past." (305)
Rachel tells Benny after they make love and he's complained about his shortcomings:
"You have to grow up," she finally said. "That's all: my own unlucky boy, didn't you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We're older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different. Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and when ever you decide to come back after that." (370)
The Epilogue in 1919 follows the connection between the 1956 and the earlier stories of the pursuit of "V." I felt the last third of the book lagged as the Crew's exploits rushed by in more dull than lively fashion, but as of 1961 their carrying on might have felt fresher than it does a half-century later. The Maltese setting's innovative, even if the characters and their plotting don't add up to as much as one hopes (a common result for Pynchon's schemers). Still, near the end, it winds up in relevant fashion, as do many of his subsequent novels, no matter how wildly told.
"If there is any political moral to be found in this world," Stencil once wrote in his journal, "it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future." (468)
I found this readable, not nearly as hard to comprehend as I'd been warned. As I turned the pages I kept wondering what would happen next. There's a lot of valleys compared to peaks, but any imaginative reader may find this entertaining and sometimes philosophical. Like "Inherent Vice," there's a detective plot overlaying deeper reflections. As with "The Crying of Lot 49" which came next, this sketches out a sketchy conspiracy that remains such. Compared to "AtD," this feels more accessible and makes a good preparation. I'm off to "Gravity's Rainbow" next, feeling finally ready for its ascent.
It is easier to nail a blob of mercury, than to describe this novel...
... so read the blurb on the back of my now ancient copy of Pynchon's classic novel. This is my third reading; I've savored less than five other books in a triple read. V's re-reads have been roughly twenty years apart. Each time I find Pynchon's erudition, across a broad range of fields, as well as his knowledge of the human condition, which he places in capitals at one point in this novel, absolutely astonishing. And perhaps the most amazing aspect is that Pynchon was only TWENTY-FOUR when he wrote it. How, how, could he have learned so much by then? It is humbling.
"V.'s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth." That is one of Pynchon's apt descriptions of his work which is imbedded in the novel. There is a thin narrative string, Stencil's nominative search for "V," starting with a discovery in his dad's diplomatic papers, which weaves its way through the book; though it would be a stretch to say that it ties it together. Along the way, Pynchon devotes entire chapters to, what for an American, are somewhat obscure portions of European history. There are the spies in Cairo, and the impact of the Fashoda incident, in 1898, as France and England jockeyed for imperial positions in Africa; there is the chapter in former German South-West Africa (present day Namibia; , in 1922, a South African mandate); another is on the political unrest in Florence, Italy in 1899, which serves as a backdrop for some Machiavellian musings on the lion and the fox; there is the siege of Malta during the Second World War, and there is another chapter set against the "June disturbances," also in Malta, of 1919, and there is Malta yet again during the "Suez crisis" of 1956.
America has its own chapters; mainly Norfolk, VA., where two of the principal characters, Pig Bodine and Benny Profane are in the process of leaving the Navy, and gravitating to NYC. Pynchon is a master of mixing the surreal, hence the comparisons with Marquez and Joyce, with analytical, factual narrative. For example, there is a wonderful section on Pig Bodine hunting the alligators in the sewers of NYC, and coming across Father Fairing's "parish," where he preached to the rats during the depression (the meek will inherit the earth!). And this is juxtaposed with the psychological and clinical descriptions involved in a Jewish woman, Esther, obtaining a nose job. Typical of Pynchon, there is a tangential narrative thread that involves Esther's plastic surgeon, Dr. Schoenmaker, and why he undertook this career, after seeing the damage done to his "hero," Godolphin, a WW I pilot. Pynchon covers the "state of the art" for plastic surgery during this period. It is disturbing; plastic surgery in its infancy. As a by-product it created many a "monster" who would haunt the cross-roads of rural America.
For an author with this narrative power, Pynchon is unique in also having a strong scientific background and knowledge which he also utilizes in the story. For example, there is the "catenary curve," complete with the correct equation; Wheatstone bridge electrical circuits, and you could even imagine Pynchon doodling away at Cornell when he decided that the "Kilroy" graffiti drawing of the Second World War was really derived from a band-pass filter! Pynchon has a dentist named Eigenvalue. The author declares that history is a "step-function." It also helps to know four other languages; the author utilizes un-translated French, German, Italian and Arabic.
Social indictments? Franz Fanon, in his The Wretched of the Earth could not have been more scathing than the author's passage about the Cairo cab driver: "where goldsmiths live in filth and tend tiny flames to make adornment for your traveling English ladies." Anti-colonialism? The entire chapter on South West Africa is devastating, culminating in: "... a guilt that had never really had meaning, that the church and the secular entrenched had made out of whole cloth; after twenty years, simply not to be ashamed. Before you disemboweled or whatever you did with her to be able to take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior officer and stay potent. And talk with them before you killed them without the sheep's eye, the shuffling, the prickly-heat of embarrassment..."
And at 24, the author had achieved some insights into the male - female relationship business: "In five years of marriage all he knew was that both of them were whole selves; hardly fusing at all, with no more emotional osmosis than leakage of semen through the solid membranes of contraceptive..."Or, "A woman wants to feel like a woman...is all. She wants to be taken, penetrated, ravished. But more than that she wants to enclose the man."Or, "Rachel now only wanted to hold him, feel the top of his beer belly flattening her bra-less breasts, already evolving schemes to make him lose weight, exercise more." Or, "And yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love: simultaneous sovereignty, yet a fusing-together. Dominance and submissiveness didn't apply."
"The Middle East, cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave."For a novel written in 1963, there are some extraordinarily relevant sections for today, including the aforementioned quote. There is the tie in to the Mahdi, the uprising in the Sudan against General Gordon, and the ivory comb, with the five crucified "limeys" that came out of those events. The comb weaves its own way through the novel, ending in a most unlikely place. Pynchon even uses an expression I felt was of recent origins only: "Shalom aleikum." It combines the Hebrew word for peace and the Arabic greeting, "be upon you." The author also has Gitmo (so abbreviated) in the novel.
And a couple of points required waiting for the lengthening perspective of the third time around: "It could only be age's worst side-effect: nostalgia."And, "All the while only in the process of learning life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane."
I found some of the party scenes a bit "flat," yet could dress them up as "dramatic interlude." Overall, though, this remains a 6-star read, one of the top 10 American novels, and worthy, with more connections still to be made, of a fourth read, if I'm offered another score of years.
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The Thomas Pynchon Joke Book
Don't be ashamed to give up