But I am not sure it would make much of a difference. My favorite passage, for example, involves Father Linus Fairing, a priest who ministers to rodents in New York’s penumbrous underground, his parish “a little enclave of light in a howling Dark Age of ignorance and barbarity.” I could endeavor to explain what his story has to do with either Profane’s picaresque adventures or Stencil’s search for V. The ride is a bumpy one, the roads sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, sometimes overgrown with weeds.
may be a person, or may be a place, though it could also be neither: Pynchon calls it, at one point, “a remarkably scattered concept” and, at another, “the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name.”Īnd that’s fine. might be fiction’s greatest example of a MacGuffin). Or the novel could be about Herbert Stencil, the son of a prominent British consular official, Sidney Stencil, who had “died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta.” Stencil’s entire existence is focused on the hunt for V., a classic novelistic quest-without-resolution (in fact, V. It may be about Benny Profane, a hopeless schlemiel who, having been discharged from the Navy, bounces around New York City with a comically harmless gang called the Whole Sick Crew, spending a good amount of time in the aforementioned crocodilian pursuit. I should confess that I have no idea what “V.” is about-and I have read it twice. And though we think of Pynchon as the progenitor of postmodern irony, the novel’s central theme, as uttered by the jazz saxophonist McClintic Sphere, is one of sly but unmistakable sincerity: “Keep cool but care.” Blast through the multilayered densities of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Mason & Dixon,” and “Against the Day,” and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover. His famous paranoia has to it a pervasive, timeless quality, equally suspicious of all creeds and systems, of individuals and corporations alike.īut to read “V.” today is to experience Pynchon anew. Despite all of the places he’s travelled, despite the near-infinite reach of his fiction, there is nevertheless a tendency, I find, to think of the media-averse Pynchon as hermetically sealed in a vat of his own ideas, puns, and fears.
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