V.

So I just finished Thomas Pynchon's novel V. God. Damn.

In the summer after third grade, I made it my goal to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Not since then has a book frustrated me so utterly, nor seemed so long. At the end of that third grade summer, I emerged proud and with a love for the trilogy born partly from a feeling of conquest. V. is no Lord of the Rings, but I emerge with a similar feeling.

There is no plot. There are two "main characters": Stencil, in search of a woman named V., and Profane, a "shlemeil" who just sort of wanders; "yo-yo's around" in the book's words. Then, there are about 50 characters who get about equal time on the pages and are all seemingly irrelevant until a little piece of their 50-page narrative is mentioned (once) in the final hundred pages. But together, they create a vision of a post-World War world (not in a linear time frame of course--too easy!), a world that should be undergoing an existential crisis but instead merely...continues. The book goes everywhere (all over Europe and the US) and does everything (sex, politics, religion) to a (deliberate) outcome of doing nothing and going nowhere: the principal theme, as I see it.

It is a portrait (more than a story) of the force of aimless youth. Nice and timely for me.

In the meantime, I am seriously considering joining the rising dark side and getting a Mac for a college laptop. Thoughts?