ABSTRACT
Pynchon’s V. (1963), although it received a good deal of positive acclaim, has not been well served by the critics. ‘V. is like a riddle that, once correctly answered, never taxes the mind again’: Robert Sklar’s comment is not untypical. Even such a committed Pynchon enthusiast as Edward Mendelson, while invoking Joyce’s Ulysses in passing, seems to see V. as simply the ‘overgrown elaboration of a simple idea’ – namely, ‘the decline of the animate into the inanimate’. There is no doubt at all about the recurring presence of this idea; indeed, the word ‘inanimate’ occurs so often (five times on one page) that one may be inclined to wonder if it is much of a ‘riddle’ to solve, if indeed it is not so over-visible and over-stressed that perhaps something else is going on. Certainly a great deal is going on, and I cannot see that such reductive criticism does justice to the wealth of the novel.
