Review: V by Thomas Pynchon

There are two main characters and many other secondary ones with crazy names and odd behavior, and most of whom do represent, i think, misfits of society, and they all hang out together as a crew, like a crazy urban tribe.

Of the two main characters, the one who seems to be emotionally vague and directionless is the one i like. When he goes away, my feelings for the book go there with him.

But still, i persevere for the other one, who seems to be overcome by passion and obsessively directed. Perhaps i stick around for him because i admire his literary skills. And he makes me wonder about the structure and the business of the story.

He is, for me, an interruption - one that does not evoke much feeling, unless you count the sense of breakage in the flow.

That sense further predicates some thinking about the flow of time in the novel (and therefore, in any other novel too). And because my emotional investment is jarred loose and put on hold, my thinking runs more freely towards critical analysis.

Which makes me wonder what the point is, if there is one, and what the issues seem to be, and how they are addressed, and how things that seem to matter are being represented.

And none of this critical meandering ever gets resolved during the break, or by the end of the book.

Is it a book? Or is it a story? Or is it a book of stories? Or is it a story of a book?

These are the kinds of questions about its structure as it relates to its orientation or its motivation that i am interested to ask during the breaks and again when the thing is done.

I also ask, in relation to the book: What is time in literature?; What is woman, and what does it mean to pursue her?; How does she relate to men's various abstractions of her, whether they be cast as physical, relational, spiritual, psychological or philosophical?; How are men and women classified by others (men and women) and how do they classify themselves?; What are relationships between men and women, friends and lovers?; What is sublime about a fool - particularly when compared to a magus?; And what makes a hero anyway?

There are no completed answers to these questions, but rather, further considerations. And in the end, because these questions are not really central (in fact, nothing really is), they only matter in the measure that you might be interested in them. And they also therefore are cut loose from the boundaries of the book (which i realize is itself a contestable division).

The book, regardless of whatever else it may be, is stimulating with regard to these considerations - even if in the end they remain as unresolved as the character i like, and as, perhaps, the book itself.

I kept on reading it because i alternately liked it and admired it, and it was strange that these relations were distinct, and the strangeness was intriguing. It was kind of like a yo-yo - which, if you ever read the book, you might think of as ironic.