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wordmaster 's review for:
V.
by Thomas Pynchon
I know of machines that are more complex than people. If this is apostasy, hekk ikun. To have Humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. (302)
V. is a paranoia-steeped tale of swirling conspiracy and political intrigue, where lowbrow characters with highbrow philosophy do silly and obscene and profound things, where the language sings and the reader is often frustrated but well-rewarded for perseverance.
In so many ways this is a denser Lot 49, a weightier Inherent Vice, a quicker AtD and a more forgiving Gravity's Rainbow... My lord, Pynchon did it all from the start.
5 stars.
*First read-through, 2017:
I haven't often been as excited to start a new book as I was to start V. Daddy's first Pynchon! I was eager and abuzz for a while--the man has been adjective-ized, for crying out loud. Consider the greats that have that honor. Dickensian. Kafkaesque. Vonnegut-y. What in the world does it mean to be Pynchonian? I couldn't wait to find out. And reading Pynchon's first novel felt like a good place to start.
Based on V., I'd say reading Pynchon feels dense and dream-like. There's a lot of surreal weirdness, and an overarching ambiguity that you must embrace to move forward. Things aren't plot-driven so much as mood-driven; characters and scenes wash over you, wave-like. Here is a world of shark-toothed sailors, bohemian subway performers, girls in need of nose jobs, captivating clocks, international espionage, sewer alligators and oracular skeletons... Sentence by sentence, Pynchon's writing is dazzling. I started dog-earing examples I might point to and quickly found myself marking every other page, feeling for all the world like an entomologist describing the diverse jeweled shells of some species of beetle:
"Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray." (15)
"He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want." (31)
"Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?" (35)
"It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion." (149)
"Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it." (158)
"For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence." (216)
Taken one after another, these elegant sentences have a soporific effect, so that by the bottom of a page it may be hard to hold onto what you read at the top. Certainly this is not a novel to rush through, and one that can frustrate with its jangling, jazz-like composition. But if you trust Pynchon to set the pace and follow along, enjoying what's laid out immediately before you, this is a remarkable novel, deep and thoughtful in a way unlike most I've read before. And as it continues on, an impressive sort of craftwork is revealed in the structure that amplifies the meaning.
4.5 stars out of 5. Truly a massive talent, but there is a streak of juvenalia here and some wholesale repeating of phrases which highlights the fact that this is Pynchon's first novel. It's a bit rough or strained in a few spots, plus there's a strange and repetitive tendency to include song lyrics. Still, what a debut! I thought of it more as an artistically-crafted piece of entertainment than an entertaining art piece (if you catch my hair-splitting drift) but then--smack!--there comes into this rollicking montage of characters and patchwork of conversations some profound insight into art, society, humankind. I am eager to read more of his oeuvre, to see what's come after he refined a bit more.
(Read in 2017, the twenty-second book of my Alphabetical Reading Challenge)