"Pynchon’s technical virtuosity, his adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness he shares with contemporaries, like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat-[are] evidences of extraordinary talent …

“V. [is] a designed indictment of its own comic elaborateness. The various quests for “V.,” all of them substitutes for the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence thus achieved is willfully fabricated and factitious. Pynchon’s intricacies are meant to testify to the waste … of imagination that first creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its technology.”

--Richard Poirier
The New York Times Book Review