Not V, not even close, I suggest...

[Mark Kohut]

V , because probably the first is the one I have reread least....I wonder
what PYnchon thinks of it and thought of it when he critiqued
his stories in SLOW LEARNER.   That he doesn't even talk about Mercy and
Mortality is more than telling.....

Tom and Melanie could surely have asked for and gotten a 50th
Anniversary edition of V published--publishers love Anniversary editions
and they are done at lesser anniversaries with lesser books (most are we
might agree) ....just as there have been different editions of most of the
others when necessary and wanted.....with some words about it from
Tom?.....was this a silent statement....

V used to be in The Modern Library--that is my second read copy---but it
was defenestrated from there...with only circumstantial---two pieces
of-bits of evidence, I believe Tom had never wanted it 'singled' out like
that because he doesn't like such....I say this because Gravity's Rainbow
was in the Random House catalog once to be reissued as an Everyman's
edition. That never happened and this all happended between the time
Candida Donadio was his agent then he fired her for Melanie Jackson....I
think they made these two "singling outs' happen---remember TRP's theme of
singling out, single lines etc...

On Wed, Sep 30, 2026 at 3:33 AM Martin Dietze <
pynchon at the-little-red-haired-girl.org> wrote:

> I realise that this takes us slightly away from the original thread, but
> I’d like to jump in on "V." - which happens to be one of my favourites in
> P’s œuvre. I think I understand where you’re coming from, but I feel rather
> differently about it (not that there’s necessarily a right or wrong here).
>
> "V." is undoubtedly bleak in its treatment of particular episodes of
> history, and of the violence and dehumanisation that we encounter
> throughout the book. But I don’t perceive the novel itself as mean. On the
> contrary, there is a great deal of warmth in it, particularly in the
> affection Pynchon shows for his characters.
>
> There is Profane, who probably embodies “meaninglessness” more than
> anybody else, but whose passivity is nevertheless contrasted with his
> deeply humane attitude towards his Puerto Rican hosts—and, of course,
> towards Fina in particular.
>
> I see Stencil not only as a tragic figure, but also as a guide through the
> novel’s historical strand.
>
> Pig Bodine forms a complete contrast to him: anarchic, completely
> uninterested in Stencil's "spiritual" perspective. But with all this
> crudeness he is one thing: alive.
>
> Even Father Fairing, the rat priest, is portrayed, for all the absurdity
> surrounding him, with a surprising amount of sympathy.
>
> My absolute hero, however - and, for me, the central figure - is Paola.
> Although she is a victim for much of the novel, there is a strength in her
> that the others seem to lack, and by the end I get the sense that she may
> actually find a way out of all this.
>
> If I had to sum up my response to "V.", I would say that I find it deeply
> moving. Of course, this is a highly personal view - but then, what isn’t?
>
>
> On 29. September 2026 at 18:30:44, Joseph Tracy via Pynchon-l (
> pynchon-l at waste.org) wrote:
>
> Re: Not V, not even close, I suggest...
>
> > On Sep 29, 2026, at 5:46 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > JT: It often seems that Pynchon can imagine no alternative to the Dante
> > plot
> > but escape, or private contentment in marriage ( M&D, maybe BE, maybe
> > ST, maybe V). Escape seems the most common ending, or in ATD escape plus
> > married contentment, or escape through renunciation/monasticism).
> > Perhaps Cyprian Latewood is the closest to Dante's hero/self.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
> You are probably right about V. Mostly everyone in V is, as I said, very
> stuck in a hellish meaninglessness. There are glimmers of the possibility
> of escape and there is Pig Bodine who seems perfectly happy in a life “of
> sin” that should put him in Dante’s hell. So actually, I don’t know why I
> listed V in that sentence. At this point V seems the darkest and meanest of
> Pynchon novels. Similar to Dante’s hell but far less boring for me, more
> revealing of how people get trapped in a stiflingly Profane worldview
> rather than just observing their torturous misery.. It was my second P
> novel after Vineland and I got fascinated with the structure that seemed,
> as I tried to understand it, to spin around a DNA like pairing of the
> earthy and subterranean, feminine and masculine, machine like power systems
> and individual desires.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>