I first read V. in college (along with several hundred other books) but i have been pushing it as P.'s finest moment ever since. I recently acquired my own copy in hardback, after a long wait (if not search) in the used-book biz. So now i am re-reading it.
First thought is: what i remember is the book's darkness--fuligin--compared to other dark books. I didn't remember the goofy frame of "the whole Sick Crew" nearly as much. And, unsurprisingly, i find myself not only rereading paragraphs, i'll even go back 2 or 3 pages to see if i understood something correctly. (Sadly, modern readers don't seem to want to put this much effort into a text.) Now, when i come across a character V. or Victoria, i look for hidden significance; when i first read it, it was a long time before i figured out what was going on.
This is a book of, among other things, divergent convergence. It gathers every byway, & makes them all describe (like a papier-mache covering to a balloon which is then deflated) an absence that impinges on each. A negative theology translated into fiction. I have also said that later Pynchon did not develop this technique, only dropped the singular withholding, toward an accumulation that rarely achieves apotheosis. Does this mean he felt more keenly the chaos of the encroaching century, & could no longer be satisfied with giving it a unifying name? We'll see...
(To be continued.)
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