The image of the artist alone in his room is a familiar one, almost mandatory for any contemporary writer suspected of self-conscious narration. Pynchon does not disappoint his readers. His first novel [V.] provides a stereotype so clearly drawn that no one can miss the point. Fausto Maijstral is a poet and he is alone in his room…. To occupy the room is to accept the closed system as the environment of fiction and entropy as the metaphor for memory. What is a story if it is not a digression? While F...

When we read a Pynchon text we may be disconcerted by it, but we usually find ourselves comfortable with at least one of its elements: setting. In fact, Pynchon's mise en scène may be the only reason for calling his books novels. He is as archeologically precise about places and things as Flaubert, although he should probably be compared to the Flaubert of Salammbô. In that text, Flaubert transports Emma Bovary's problems back to Carthage, rendering both Emma and the setting abst...

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...

Many who have written on Pynchon seem much too anxious to present him as a humanistic novelist with redeeming social concerns, although they allow that he sometimes stoops to horseplay, despairing parody, or a few edifying chills in order to share his vision with us. But it seems to me more revealing to view Pynchon as a vastly capable writer of science fiction … than it is to insist that he is a humanistic novelist, or a satirist bent on mending the world. The impulses that created Gravity's ...

Pynchon's verbal complexities astound and confound, amaze and bewilder, because his mixed modes concern the ultimate formlessness of a world that for a decade now he has urged as much as described. Everything bears, and bears on, everything else in Pynchon's coming world; everything discovers some grosser or more petite example of itself; everything leads simultaneously to hope and despair…. How can Pynchon be persuaded of entropy's irreversibility and simultaneously of a second ...

I find it admirable that of the nonacademics Pynchon did not follow the usual lazy course of going for tenure as did so many writers—no, "writers"—of his generation…. The fact that he has got out into the world (somewhere) is to his credit. Certainly he has not, it would seem, missed a trick; and he never whines. Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in 1963…. Cute names abound. Benny Profane, Dewey Gland, Rachel Owlglass. Booze flows through scene after s...

In Pynchon's novels the plots of wholly imagined fiction are inseparable from the plots of known history or science. More than that, he proposes that any effort to sort out these plots must itself depend on an analytical method which, both in its derivations and in its execution, is probably part of some systematic plot against free forms of life. The perspectives—literary, analytic, pop cultural, philosophical, scientific—from which Pynchon operates are considerably more numerous than ...

[Let] us postulate one overriding function of this contraption called V., namely to call attention to history not as a nightmare from which we're trying to awake, but as a fantasy into which we've been mythically herded. It should be pointed out that V. proposes no history at all, not even a fake one, since to be historical is to be fictional in the least rewarding sense…. Such history-oriented fictions—and it makes no difference whether the history is personal or public, social ...

Chance meetings in Pynchon's novels are exploited as parodies of realism by being accepted as part of the normal, necessary order of events. A line of action that is entirely arbitrary, that is taken by chance, links perfectly with others that are stumbled upon, and all of them lead somehow to the right place. Yet this right place, whether it be V. or a full disclosure of the Tristero system, is never finally reached. The clues that Oedipa Maas assembles about the Tristero in Lot 49 are all happened ...