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."

What is important to the book takes place outside the realm of the characters' actions, and to a large extent outside their comprehension; and it's only indirectly, semi-allegorically connected with Stencil's search for V. That is more in the nature of a private anxiety, since the woman in whom the principle of V was momentarily embodied, insofar as she was an individual at all, was dead well before the action of the novel starts…. The search for V is therefore pointless and obsessive as it's carried on after the war; it goes beyond the person, beyond even the several perhaps-conspiracies of which she may have been an intermittent agent, into her existence as a malignant or at best indifferent principle of nature…. The fact that a number of other people can get caught up in a search-program as flimsy as Stencil's shows by strong implication how loosely they're attached to the texture of everyday life. Yet the fact is that everyday life itself includes alien and even hostile elements, as is shown most gruesomely in the discovery after her death and dismemberment that the lady largely consisted of inanimate prosthetic materials—a wig, a glass eye, false teeth, a wooden foot, a star sapphire imbedded in her navel. Thus, though the search for V as protracted by Stencil is insane, her reported nature ties her closely to a theme running through the entire book, the encroachment and usurpation of the inanimate world on the animate. V as a physical principle needn't be sought anywhere because she (it) is present everywhere; V as a person can't be sought, because she is dead. There's a potent unspoken connection here. (pp. 170-72)

As a sensitive schlemiel, Benny Profane is at hopeless odds with all natural things, a Redeemer limp and helpless against encroaching evil; he sees it but is helpless to do anything about it. This is why—against superficial probability—he is such a magnet for women who want to protect, mother, and be personally intimate with him. Yet hardly any of this vision of a world gradually depersonalizing relates more than hazily to the narrative. Reified people are simply a condition of the world within which the novel takes place, and Stencil's preference for connecting it with lady V (or Vernichtung or Valletta, or Victoria, or vortex, or all of them) is hardly shielded at all from the suspicion that it's a private obsession. Stencil's search and the structure of the world are like two giant vortexes the tips of which meet in the paper-thin plane of the narrative action.

Stencil, junior, has the interesting mannerism of referring to himself only in the third person, as if he were an outline to be filled in; it's a revealing individual mannerism, but the condition it bespeaks is general, striking in him mainly because he has such a phantom-image of what his life must contain. Nobody remarks his transparency because nobody is more opaque than he is; on the contrary, his insane energy contrasts with their random jittering, catches them up and organizes them for a moment, before moving on and out. (p. 173)

The V of V's that Pynchon uses as an epigraph to his novel intimates the narrowing of the ordering mind to a point of monomania, the simultaneous reduction of life to a single point of vitality, and so the limiting of kindly intent among or between human beings to an automatic gesture of self-defeat—like a secular saint walking through life under the name "Profane."… Pynchon's characters are [thin and flat]; the arabesques of their activity are strictly limited, and behind them—bad if it's only an obsession, worse if it's something more—is the encroachment of an inanimate, impersonal, inhuman power. It speaks in Pynchon's prose, which is frequently colored gray by scientific and technical terminology; it speaks even more coldly in a constant fascination with abstract and impersonal process. Pynchon's outline-characters caper across an ice-cold universe. Their relation to Joyce's outline-figures (who yet never fail to be full of other outlines) is neither intimate nor immediate. But in the sense of a fragile and fearful existence maintained against the grain of an ostentatiously pointless plot, they are a true Joycean development. Like Joyce's personae, they swim the waters of a sea thick with the plankton of learning both vulgar and encyclopedic; and the fable they unfold has no more to do with morality than with politics or religion. Heroes and villains of the book are its underlying patterns, the real plot is our ability to see them; and in that respect, rather than in other, more immediate characteristics, the book declares its parentage.

"Oneiric chill," a phrase used somewhere in V for a specific purpose, characterizes the book as a whole, and carries over with special relevance to Gravity's Rainbow—an extraordinary tour de force of paranoid fantasy, cloak-and-dagger romance, and technological poetry…. As in V, there's no following the chain of events; it isn't a chain but a Jackson Pollock of wiggling lines, blobs, blurs, and smears. Many words are spoken, but only rarely by individuals; thoughts and impressions occur, but are rarely localized behind any specific pair of eyeballs. What the novel represents is not what happened over a period of time to a few chosen individuals, but the nightmare of the disintegrating European mind in the final stages of a war that was as much enacted as fought. There's no order or economy or coherence to this story…. In its erratic and tangled course, the novel blossoms into extravagantly decadent orgies, narrows down to Keystone-Cop chases, turns to brutally sadistic animal episodes, and always, always weaves developing technologies and corporate mergers, chains of command and task-force terminology into the weft of human intentions. (pp. 174-75)

The deciphering of novel by reader parallels the persistent, paranoid effort of the "characters" (but they are transparent cutouts, not true characters) to decipher the twisted and tormented face of Europe; a collective message works its painful way toward consciousness. The world is a palimpsest, but the topmost message is not letters at all, it is a tangle of squirming, semi-animate shapes. (p. 176)

Pynchon has written, in Gravity's Rainbow, an appallingly intelligent, deeply disbelieving, almost unreadable parable of the modern world; it has the frigidity of a nightmare, along with a nightmare's lurking suspicion that there's another and worse nightmare lurking behind this one. You can't even trust your sense of horror. The book perhaps suffers, like those of Joyce, from too slavish a devotion to the principle of imitation—chaos is altogether chaotic and void is bleakly vacant; like Joyce's novels, too, it defies all principles of economy, and sometimes its black humor is a little jejune. But in the large it's a deeply moving and very serious book. (p. 178)

Though it's deeply rooted in specific locales and a limited period of time, Gravity's Rainbow again reminds us of Joyce in suggesting behind the immediate scenario a timeless and universal process. People intrude on objects only peripherally and blunderingly, objects advance on people inexorably, and people cooperate with this process by calmly converting others or themselves into objects. In a book that's saturated with sex, mostly the kinky varieties to be sure, some of the most passionate and sensitive writing is devoted to a celebration of the special molecular affinities of different families of plastics. The book's perspectives are inhumanly long. Pynchon appears to have less than no interest in morals, in politics, in religion, in what used to be called "human nature." He doesn't write an "art novel" properly so called, a realistic novel, a novel of ideas, a horror story, a psychological study, or a science-fiction fable—though traces of all these ingredients are perceptible. Though the phrase doesn't characterize it very closely, Gravity's Rainbow could be called a visionary apocalyptic novel, Joycean less in specific techniques than in its scope, penetration, and cold perspective. (pp. 178-79)