Where can I find the review of V., by Thomas Pynchon?

The review? As in, the definitive review? Bud, I think you're expecting too much from your fearless scribbler here. V. came out back in, what was it, 1960? [1963, actually. - id] All the reviews must be well over 40 years old now, and I never read a single one of them.

Oh, well... Let's see what we can do for you.

Perhaps the best place to go for that pesky review would be the New York Times, which has a well-hidden collection of Pynchon related articles. You know, this page used to be cached in Google but, as I've pointed out earlier, they seem to have excised it from their drives. (A search for Pynchon on the Times' website will return a bunch of significant links, actually; it's just that the pages' content is no longer cached.) What's the matter, trouble with the Gray Lady, guys? Well, I better add that data here myself; I don't think Google is ever going to restore it.

More on Thomas Pynchon
From the Archives of The New York Times

Reviews of:

"V.", (1963), reviewed by George Plimpton

"The Crying of Lot 49", (1966)

"Gravity's Rainbow", (1973)

"Slow Learner: Early Stories", (1984)

"Vineland", (1990), reviewed by Salman Rushdie

By Thomas Pynchon:

"A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" (1966)

"Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?" (1984)

A review of "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1988)

"The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee" (1993)

There we go! So now you can access George Plimpton's review of V. (titled The Whole Sick Crew), written back then when the novel in question was first published. I think. It's hard to figure out: the page gives a publication date of October 6, 1966, but also shows a second date of April 21, 1963. Talk about preserving the historical record!

You know, it would have been a lot easier to ask for a review of Pynchon's latest, Mason & Dixon. That was published on 1997, when we already had the Web available as a publishing medium. That's a boon for book reviews! You can check those available at Salon (Weird Morning in America, by Scott McLemee: "Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon travels back to pre-Revolutionary times to map the 'cryptic & perilous' contours of a nation."), Slate (Z., by Walter Kirn: "Pynchon's tiresome mind games."), and, once again, the Times itself (The Great Divide, by T. Coraghessan Boyle: "Thomas Pynchon's novel features two historical figures who were sent to America to settle a dispute.").

Finally, if you want a comprehensive resource to things Pynchon-related, check out "Spermatikos Logos" at The Modern Word. Its curator, Dr. Larry Daw, offers a cornucopia of information to delight a Pynchonite.

What's that? What's my opinion of V.? Uh... My copy (in Spanish, no less!) still remains unopened. I'll have to get back to you on that.