V. (492 pp.) Thomas Pynchon—Lippincott ($5.95).
There is a myth that the Manhattan sewer system is full of alligators.
The idea is that children bought baby alligators for pets, and when they got bored with them, they flushed them into the sewers. The myth is part of this likable, mad and unfathomable first novel. Not an integral part; Author Pynchon has taken great pains to ensure that his book has none of these. The novel is built on the plan of the expanding universe or of one of those whirling platforms at amusement parks; the reader starts at the center, and, as the narration picks up speed, slides helplessly toward infinity, while his sanity and his umbrella drift away in different directions.
The Yo-Yo. Benny Profane, a schlemiel (the Yiddish word for chronic bumbler), is the novel's antihero. Shouts of triumph or yelps of protest are not for schlemiels; Benny's conversation is limited to "What?" and "Wha." The alligators come into it when he arrives in New York after a Navy hitch—the liberty scenes in Norfolk are done with loving verity—and needs a job. So he gets one shooting alligators for the city. This keeps him in beer, and more he does not need. He sleeps in the bathtub of a West Side apartment belonging to the Whole Sick Crew, a jackdaw's collection of oddballs and endalls.
Couples recline, neuroses entwine, and Benny, friendly, polite and stupid, gets drunk and inadvertently invents the mad fad of yo-yoing. To yoyo, one gets piggy-drunk, falls asleep in the subway, and rides back and forth all night. The yo-yo who makes the most trips is champion, and the crosstown shuttle does not count.
Thus described, Pynchon's book sounds like a Jack Kerouac eruption. It is not. The prose is quiet, sane and assured, even when it is describing something like the invention (by someone Benny meets at a party) of a coin-operated whorehouse for bus and railway stations.
Sleeping Goddess. But the Sick Crew's carryings-on form only the mundane, or Profane, surface of this weird chronicle. There is, underlying everything like a half-forgotten goddess in restive sleep, the matter of V. What, or who, is V.? A Crew member named Stencil, the son of a mysterious and long-dead operative of the
British Foreign Office, hopes to find out. Perhaps V. stands for Venezuela, and an abortive political plot of the turn of the century. Perhaps it stands for Vesuvius, or for Valletta, the capital of Malta. More likely, but not at all certainly, it is the first initial of the name of a mysterious girl tourist, Victoria Wren, who vanished in 1901 but turns up in different guises at times of riot or political intrigue. Victoria wears a glass eye whose iris is a clock face.
Pursuing V., the author leads a phantasmagoric tour through the dream country of the past in a series of darkly illumined flashbacks. At one point, V. is in Florence in the midst of fathomless political conspiracies; at another, she is in South West Africa during the brutal repression of the natives during the '20s. All clues finally lead to Valletta, where V., disguised as the Bad Priest, is injured in a World War II air raid and is disassembled by a band of children: her glass eye is stolen; her false feet of amber and gold, with veins in intaglio are removed; a sapphire is dug from her navel.