BOOKS
275
right with them. In the novels of Bernard Malamud the schlemihl
succeeds at last in becoming his own special kind of
Mensch,
for whom
the reader will laugh and cry, whom he will delight in and hold to his
heart. Poor Benny Profane is undercut by his very name, as are his
friends Rachel Owlglass, Roony and Mafia Winsome, Pig Bodine, Slap,
Raoul, Fang, Sphere and Melvin. Can one explore the nature of
paralysis by manipulating symbolic cripples?
The other half of the book displays awesome virtuosity, but
tnt:
greater the virtuosity, the less readable I find it. During the
quest for V. the style juggles farce, melodrama, mysticism and old–
fashioned horror. Despite the moments-as in the South African section
-when Pynchon truly captures the tone of casual terror which has
ravaged the century of V., he is wt'iting for the most part in the
tradition of the international detective-story, and freighting his detective
with
so much metaphysical baggage that the case becomes impenetrable.
The detective finds the elusive V. blockaded by rubbish-heaps of arty
deadness.
The search for V., after aI!, falls squarely within the tradition
of the quest for the metaphysical absolute as it is embodied in the
American novel. The trouble with the lady V., seen in the light of this
tradition, is that she is
only
an essence,
only
an absolute. Surely no
creature could be more symbolic than Moby Dick, but he is also a
gigantically palpable white whale, and we know exactly why Ahab must
take him, symbol or not. Likewise with Huck and Jim: we know that
the freedom they seek is in some sense abstract and that the river
can only float them on to recapture; but on the other hand they are
going down that river, and the water is so real a man can drown
in
it. And with Gatsby-Daisy may not measure up to the image for
which he has created his fabulous career, but she is a fleshly, living
woman with a voice ful! of money. And even the modest heroes of
Hemingway look for their heaven in a moment of physical truth, a
day of love, and a rare meal. I cannot believe these objects of the
Great Quest suffer for their concreteness. It is their substantiality that
gives them emotional shape and meaning; no reader can simply
care
as
much in the abstract.
The melodrama, in short, is a cop-out, which allows the writer to
be
magician, raconteur, linguist, cartographer, diplomatic historian, and
tourist guide-everything but novelist. It is fashionable, I know, to
iieve that the times are not ripe for novel writing, but I have yet
to see in any of the books which hide behind this assumption evidence
of
a basic change in human nature. Granted that the environment
