On its surface, V is an incredibly active novel, with an immense cast of characters as vigorously in motion as a swarm of paramecia in a drop of swamp-water. They penetrate the sewer systems of Manhattan, yo-yo up and down the East Coast, rattle around Egypt, Florence, Malta, and South Africa; they change appearances, change identities, couple like rabbits, group and regroup, diffuse and drop out of sight as fast as motes in a beam of sunlight. The activity isn't completely pointless, since plots and semi-connected actions form and reform, sometimes unbeknownst to the participants, sometimes accidentally; but often all pretense of sequential behavior disintegrates in a whirl of miscellaneous partying, a picturesque but gratuitious act. In the end, the various plots don't cohere, the individual actions are spaced out. Why does Paola Maijstral feel she has to enter a black whorehouse in order to become, or in...