lOOKS
273
THE NEW SCHLEMIHL
V. By
Thom~s
Pynchon.
J .
B. Lippincott Co. $5.95.
The best review of
V.
is the drawing on the dust cover,
which depicts the bare letter V. on a ruled desert-colored plain stretching
away to a flat horizon. The texture of the prose has been produced by
a deliberate flattening technique, despite the most varied and detailed
scenery. The effect is that of a super-scientist examining life under a
microscope and taking a detached interest in the movements of the
myriad forms he sees. To support this effect the writing has
been
care–
fully excised of emotion. Human activity, to Pynchon, is "a succession
of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world which
simply doesn't care." His characters are perpetually baffled and subdued
by
the objects of an "inanimate world," the symbols of which are always
coming between them in the form of electrodes or electric wires
in
a
man's forearm, catastrophic balloons rising into the air, ineradicable
stains, false teeth, personified automobiles, and so forth.
The encounter between animate and inanimate
is
illustrated
by
two narrative strands which mingle from time to time but which
seem to have no basic connection. In the more realistic
parts
of the
book a self-designated "schlemihl" named Benny Profane makes of
himself "a human yo-yo" and bounces through the 1950's, drifting into
the Navy and out again, working at pointless jobs
in
several American
cities, joining when he can a gang of shadow-friends in New York
called the Whole Sick Crew, and above all killing time by "yo-yoing"
back
and forth over the lines of public transportation. The rest of the
book is taken up with the efforts of a man who refers
to
himself in the
third person as Stencil
to
trace back and discover the identity of a
mysterious woman known as "V.", who was somehow connected with
his
father, a widely-traveling member of the English foreign service.
Tfie quest is bursting with metaphysical implications, and as V. shows
up in ever-shifting guises all over the world and in incidents dating
back to the turn of the century, Thomas Pynchon has ample opportunity
to
create esoteric melodrama-usually involving a ridiculous British
diplomatic corps-in Alexandria, Florence, South Africa, Cairo, Paris,
Malta, etc. By the time one has read one's way through diplomatic
crises all over the Empire, through the bars and ships and sewen of
the eastern seacoast of America, and through parties, cars, subways,
buses,
ferries, and a complete nose-job in harrowing detail, one must
grant Pynchon the most encyclopedic sense of scene since Tolstoy.
