I turned 21 today (happy birthday to myself…) and honestly, I have no idea what I'm doing with my life. There’s this expectation that at this age, you’re supposed to know how to move through life — that you’re now fully responsible for your actions, your direction, your future. But I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t really know anything, and in that uncertainty, reading V. felt like something strangely necessary. It didn’t offer answers, but it gave me something else... permission to feel lost, maybe, or to at least recognize that being lost is an inherent part of life.
Considering this novel is very messy, the way I made peace with V. was to treat it like jazz. There’s no clean story. Everything feels disconnected. You’re not going to pin it down into a neat sequence of events or tidy takeaways. You listen for the rhythm. You let yourself move with it, pick up on recurring riffs — fetishism, dismemberment, entropy, history, love — and you let it all blur together without trying to resolve it. Like McClintic Sphere playing in a corner of the novel, it doesn’t explain itself. It just plays. That’s how this novel works. If you try to read it like a regular story, it’ll fight you. But if you treat it like sound, or like a half-remembered dream, it gets into your skin.
What stuck with me, more than any of the allusions or historical weirdness, was how it reflected the emptiness I’ve been feeling in my own life. There’s Benny Profane, drifting from job to job, horny and tired and emotionally unavailable. There’s Herbert Stencil, chasing after a woman, or an idea, or maybe just the illusion of narrative coherence — with the desperation of someone who knows there’s nothing behind the curtain but needs to believe anyway. I saw myself in both of them. One gives up on meaning entirely, the other can’t let go of it even when it hurts. They mirror two sides of the same kind of existential confusion I’ve been feeling. And all the while, the world of the novel — Pynchon’s 20th century — is falling apart, full of people numbing themselves with sex, booze, ideology, and language that doesn’t mean anything anymore.
And I guess that’s what makes V. feel so honest and sentimental, even in all its confusion. Pynchon doesn’t give you an answer, and that’s the point... Just more wandering, more fragments, more improvisation. Like jazz, it’s not about solving anything.
“That the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn’t come as a revelation, only something he’d as soon not’ve admitted.”
Another thing that really stayed with me was the way women are treated in the novel — not just by the men around them, but by the systems they’re caught in. V. is obsessed with fetishism, with the process of turning people, especially women, into objects, symbols, mechanisms. It’s about how the body becomes a site of performance, how intimacy becomes a transaction, and how violence is rationalized as structure.
You see it most clearly in Mondaugen’s Story, where a woman — beaten, stripped of agency, ritualized into someone else’s sexual and political theater — manages to escape only to die offstage, discarded. Her body washes up on the beach. She dies nameless, faceless, not as a character, but as an inevitability. And no one really mourns her. No one can. She’s already been reduced to function. To symbol. That chapter was the hardest to process for me. Because the horror wasn’t in the sensationalism: it was in how normal the violence felt to the people inflicting it. How it was just part of the setting, like the weather or the furniture.
This is a thread that runs through the entire novel. Women appear as dolls, mannequins, synthetic bodies, mirrors for male projection. Even V. herself is more presence than person, broken up into symbols and pieces: never fully alive, never fully hers...
What’s terrifying is how close this vision feels to the world we live in. Not just in terms of gender, but in how we’ve learned to aestheticize care, to algorithmize desire, to reduce each other to curated images and consumable parts. Pynchon shows us what happens when we no longer recognize each other as whole people: when our bodies become metaphors, when our lives become data, when our pain becomes scenery.
And in the world we’re living in now, it feels like technology is accelerating that process in real time. Everything gets streamlined into content. Intimacy becomes branding. Suffering becomes a caption. We mediate our identities through filters and platforms designed not for connection, but for circulation. The logic of commodification is embedded in how we interact: we package ourselves, optimize ourselves, measure ourselves by engagement. It’s not that technology is inherently dehumanizing, but it’s being used in ways that turn us into products, into patterns, into predictable nodes in a network. We’re encouraged to see ourselves the way an algorithm would: as metrics, as aesthetic, as output.
Frankly, reading V. now, it felt like a warning that came too late...