Rating: 
Summary: V
Review: What is V? Is it Vogt, the night-time Austrian spy? The (possibly) mystical country Vheissu? Or perhaps Venezuela? The mountain Vesuvius? Veronica the rat, wannabe priestess? Vera Meroving? Veronica Manganese? All of these, none? Does V even exist?Enter Benny Profane, self-proclaimed Schlemihl and human yo-yo, ex Navy, down on his luck, slightly fat, afraid/entranced by inanimate objects and seemingly incapable of having sex, no matter how many girls blatantly offer. Soon he is entangled with the Whole Sick Crew, a bunch of disillusioned wanna-be artists content to spend their days and nights drinking and discussing the finer points of a society they claim to disdain. Stencil, a middle-aged Crew member on the fringe, is obsessed with tracking down V, linking seemingly obscure, random facts from around the world and throughout time to hunt down the enigmatic...person? Place? Event? In true Pynchon style, we are mercilessly rocketed from location to location, time to time, character to character. Sentences can begin in 20th century New York and end in 19th century France. Chapters can start in Africa and, through a series of bewildering but carefully placed changes, visit Germany, Italy, America and other areas of Africa during the forty-years previous Herero massacres. The present time events, focusing on Profane and the Crew, are fast-paced, witty, and for the most part, hilarious. Almost every scene is a party, one notable exception being a hideously graphic nose job. Brief forays into the sewers of New York city near the start of the book are another welcome exception. Certain ruminations on something v-related (and boy are there a lot!) can trigger whole chapters in the past, some of which are entertaining and meaningful, others of which are unfortunately a drag to read. On the whole, a little over half the extended flashbacks succeed, which isn't a good enough percentage for my liking, but thankfully there is enough here to keep anyone interested. It is important to note that this is Pynchon's first book, and he was very young when it was written. While the trademarks we've come to love are there: hilarity, songs, extreme tangents, ridiculous character names, the flow just isn't as strong as later books. It does suffer from a feeling of being disjointed, and unfortunately a lot of the sections ONLY link to the 'main' storyline is the letter V, a link which is just not strong enough at times. Still, this is a Pynchon novel; his weaknesses are the strengths of lesser authors.
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