Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
Cook's Tour
By Richard Poirier
V.
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, $5.95
Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon's first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathanael West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them. V. is full of self-mystified people consistently avoiding direct relations with one another through disguise or evasion, people living the disrupted existences either of the Cook's Tour, in one plot, or, in the other, of a kind of contemporary tourism called 'yo-yoing,' the pointless, repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway. Neither of the two interwoven plots is presented in sequence. One involves a self-styled schlemihl named Benny Profane, his naval buddies, and a gang in New (sometimes 'Nueva') York who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew. The other is an international melodrama of spying that covers the years since 1898. It is reconstructed by Herbert Stencil—the name meaning that he is a copy of his father in the effort to keep track of the elusive V. He cannot be sure what V. is, whether she (or it) is not wholly a fantasy.
Review, 1508 words
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