Thomas Pynchon's mind is labyrinthine. This book was published when he was 26 years old and it baffles me how somebody could have the breadth and depth of experience, particularly at that age, to be able to write like this. There is a sweeping sense of context throughout that seamlessly ties together every disparate element at play, the contemporary and the ancient intertwined into one yo-yoing path, picking up all the world's detritus as it rumbles along - a great, huffing, puffing steam train of cognition. Yet it never feels forced; it never feels like it is an exercise in showmanship like so many other writers would succumb to. Each digression feels as natural as thinking, like Pynchon has tapped into the natural cosmic order of things and pulled words from some private aether; there is no pretence, it simply exists. Or rather, maybe it has always existed.
If you were to ask me what this book is about I would not be able to tell you. Somewhere in its depths lurks cosmic mistress, V. - a capricious figure pain-stakingly, and yet dubiously, reconstructed from the memories of others, the single-minded focal point of one of our protagonists, Stencil. "V. ambiguously a beast of venery, chased like the hart, hind or hare, chased like an obsolete, or bizarre, or forbidden form of sexual delight." And on the other side of the coin, we have protagonist #2 - our schlemihl, Profane, merely trying to get by as all those around him seek meaning in a universe of closed systems. Perhaps V. is simply that inalienable pursuit of meaning or finality or something to assuage the little slices of fear we are fed throughout our lifetime. Perhaps V. is something different for everyone, maybe we all have our own V.'s we are searching and striving for. Or perhaps, to quote Profane, "I haven't learned a goddamn thing."
A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; “ominous logic”—pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.
Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.
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