On its surface, V is an incredibly active novel, with an immense cast of characters as vigorously in motion as a swarm of paramecia in a drop of swamp-water. They penetrate the sewer systems of Manhattan, yo-yo up and down the East Coast, rattle around Egypt, Florence, Malta, and South Africa; they change appearances, change identities, couple like rabbits, group and regroup, diffuse and drop out of sight as fast as motes in a beam of sunlight. The activity isn't completely pointless, since plots and semi-connected actions form and reform, sometimes unbeknownst to the participants, sometimes accidentally; but often all pretense of sequential behavior disintegrates in a whirl of miscellaneous partying, a picturesque but gratuitious act. In the end, the various plots don't cohere, the individual actions are spaced out. Why does Paola Maijstral feel she has to enter a black whorehouse in order to become, or in spite of the fact that she is, the preferred girl of McClintic Sphere? Why after a spell there does she feel inclined to go back to Pappy Hod, with whom life seems distinctly less preferable? These things, and many others, happen, but without apparent motivation, or at least only with such motivation as the reader wants to impute to the character after the event. Uncertainty and actual provocation are built into the structure of the fiction…. [The] plot (in the sense of "what happens to the characters," and even in the sense of "how the characters' inner life develops") is not the vehicle of the book's main interest. Its function, and the function of all that frantic, superficial activity, is to distract and impede, not to express. One can't say that it does or doesn't function in other ways as well; there's an uncertainty principle at work as we read, in that no action is so far-fetched or remote that it can't, perhaps later, tie up on some level with another; and the construction isn't so tight that what looks important can't be simply forgotten or erased by a coincidence.
In any event, all the hurry and scurry in the novel—drunken brawls, promiscuous beddings-down, aimless wanderings, mistaken identities, weird acts of violence, and arbitrary linkages—lead nowhere. For one tale that is tied up in pink ribbon—probably sardonic—like that of Paola and Pappy, there are dozens that the author leaves hanging in mid-air, without bothering to conclude them…. And apart from all the characters who simply split off the action and disappear, the action plot itself is meaningless. Profane, the schlemiel-Redeemer, makes the point about all his "experience" at the end of the book, when he says "offhand" (but he means "in deepest seriousness"), "I'd say I haven't learned a goddamn thing."
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