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V.

Thomas Pynchon

3.96 · Rating details · 19,397 ratings · 1,050 reviews

The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men—one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose—and "V.," the unknown woman of the title. ...more

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Paperback, 547 pages

Published July 5th 2005 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published August 1st 1963)

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Apr 10, 2013 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

When I’ve been reading V. quite a while ago I couldn’t get out of dictionaries and encyclopedias – the book is a carnival of words and ideas.

Say a man is no good for anything but jazzing around. He’ll go live in a cathouse, he’ll jazz it all over town.

People like anything: gossip, rumours, hearsay, tall tales, myths… The only thing they don’t like is truth…

Geronimo stopped singing and told Profane how it was. Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over

...more

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Feb 22, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2010, read-2013, reviews-5-stars, re-read, pynchon, reviews, exert-yourself

How Hard Can It Possibly Be?

"V" isn't so much a difficult novel to read - it is after all just words, most of which are familiar - as one in which it is sometimes hard to understand what is going on and why.

What does it mean? Does it have to mean anything? How does it all connect?

Ironically, if not intentionally, the inability to determine what and why, as well as who, is part of its design. Pynchon mightn't want to answer all the questions he or life asks.

However, that doesn't mean there isn't ...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: r-2013, 4-star, reviewed, 1-read-on-hand, r-goodreads

4.5/5

Knowledge is a funny business. Everyone pretends omniscience in the classroom, but god forbid you spout off like an intellectual outside of it. And then you have the subculture of people making an effort to read Pynchon in public, and the other subcultures that amuse themselves at their expense. The verdict seems to be know it all, but please, spare us from your efforts to prove it.

I'd sell my soul to write like this at the age of six and twenty. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when i 4.5/5

Knowledge is a funny business. Everyone pretends omniscience in the classroom, but god forbid you spout off like an intellectual outside of it. And then you have the subculture of people making an effort to read Pynchon in public, and the other subcultures that amuse themselves at their expense. The verdict seems to be know it all, but please, spare us from your efforts to prove it.

I'd sell my soul to write like this at the age of six and twenty. There, I admitted to lack of know-how when it comes to the realm of Pynchon. Of course, the reference to souls might not be worth much coming from someone with no memory of being religious in any sense, but I'd like to think the Catholic upbringing accredits the statement somewhat. My horse may be hitched to atheism, but I can still appreciate good theological diatribes with healthy roots in philosophy and literature.

Which is what I'm getting at here. Roots. Easily graspable statements with esoteric legs to stand on. A sense of context that spans the contemporary as easily as the ancient, and ties the two together in the delightfully tangible sense. Ivory computers, porcelain circuitry, old materials caking the eternal Street from 1955's Norfolk to 1919's Malta and beyond. To say the word 'automaton' and have the images of golems and cyborgs seamlessly interweave on the succeeding pages.

This isn't your banal tactic of cultural references and knowledge dropping at every turn. I suppose I should give credit to Neal Stephenson for setting up an apparatus of tin foil and pipe cleaner, to better display Pynchon's idol of ebony and titanium. The desire to imitate that deceptive depth of story is understandable. Not everyone can write in the style of the yo-yo, apex to apex, apocheir to apocheir, without the bottom ponderously dropping out or the string severing at the zenith or the snagging speed making the ride sickening to the stomach.

And again, six and twenty! 1963! In the US! Did you know that this book passes the Bechdel Test? I wouldn't have believed it either, least not without reading it for myself. Or believed without experiencing for myself how conscious the story is of life and its seeming coincidences, long lines of 'plot' drifting back and forth from immediate relevance to useless trivia. It never forsakes the surface details for the underlying meaning, and vice versa, and there's even spots of real humor and true beauty to be found. It's a rare talent that belies Pynchon's youth, to describe the passions that drive the intricate clockwork of the small days, and contextualize them in the themes that have, do, and will span for millenia. And to switch from one to the other without any noticeable jerks or shuddering! It makes one question the validity of the categories of knowledge that we function in, conventional discourse that so many gain use of by sacrificing the essence of their critical thinking. Puzzle pieces guaranteeing a pretty picture, inherently forsaking its right to a blank canvas.

"Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words--"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"--pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty, round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

So, knowledge? Pynchon has it, and shows it in endless waves of connective tissues. I don't claim to understand all of it. But I have to thank him for my new-found way of thinking about this reading business of mine, my yo-yoing along the V shaped tracks of books like his, picking up bits and pieces with every passing over the same old stomping grounds. There's a surface of tin cans and plastic rubbish in those lands, and a wind whistling of ages past that sounds all the clearer the longer you walk. You can walk forward, and you can walk back, but to tread the same way twice is an impossibility, for better or for worse. ...more

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Nov 13, 2016 MJ Nicholls rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: merkins, novels

So I opted to tango once more with Thomas. The results are a mix of the same frustrations I had with the first 150 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow (dropped thereafter), and a newfound appreciation for the most famous maximilist’s skill for writing sentences of incredible inventiveness, rhythm, and frenetic lunacy. After 300-odd pages of this novel, the niggles (new and old) returned—the introduction of innumerable madcap characters and their endless zing-flinging dialogue in the same voice; the overa ...more

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May 04, 2019 Steven Godin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: postmodern-fiction, america-canada

Who or what is V? Would love to sit here and say that I even cared. It's certainly advisable to read this novel with a clear head. Not the sort of book you want to sit up in bed with late at night with one eye open whilst the other one sleeps. No, this requires complete and utter attention. Alternatively, you could forget what I just said, let one's hair down, grab a drink, forget the plot, and just be dazzled by some preposterously madcap and rollickingly eccentric passages of writing. If someo Who or what is V? Would love to sit here and say that I even cared. It's certainly advisable to read this novel with a clear head. Not the sort of book you want to sit up in bed with late at night with one eye open whilst the other one sleeps. No, this requires complete and utter attention. Alternatively, you could forget what I just said, let one's hair down, grab a drink, forget the plot, and just be dazzled by some preposterously madcap and rollickingly eccentric passages of writing. If someone passed me this book and I didn't know who had written it, I would assume it was some wacko whos marble bag is a few balls sort.

Just because it's highly original, and it truly is, that doesn't mean it just gets to automatically qualify for masterpiece status. Although for the hardcore Pynchon fans shouting at the screen I can fully understand if you view it that way. If he really is the Godfather of postmodern hip lit then good for him. I remember reading Vineland back in 2015, and it still remains the most fun I have had with a book, ever!. This simply couldn't match it. No way. I even prefered Inherent Vice, which oddly made much more sense to me. Normally I would have quit this, but abnormally something keep me going, but I don't quite know what is was. Probably just wanting to know what lunacy was awaiting in the coming pages.

One thing I would love to give Pynchon a pat on the back for is his characters names. They have to be some of the most brilliant out of the ordinary in all of literature. So then, what does V. have that other early post-war novels lack? It certainly emphasizes the creation of a sort of modern mythology which becomes apparent the further in you go. Digressions of both idea and narrative here prove hard to crack most of the time, it was like playing around with a device that had a ten-digit code. The mode of storytelling stretches far back from the postmodern era though. Of course most will think Of Joyce. He did it for the moderns with Ulysses, writing a Homeric odyssey for a generation in which heroism lay flat on its face.

V. kind of reminds us that we never really made it that far away from ancient polytheism. Benny Profane, one of the central characters walks the streets of New York City alternating between spells of Erotic and Bacchic revelry. As wanderer back from the war, an archetype as old as written words, Profane lacks a homeland where he might end his voyage. Whilst the obsessive Herbert Stencil, searching for V., finds the quest for his Holy Grail undercut with the eternally unknowable.
He isn't the only one.

Profane and the whole sick crew blunder along, tormented by drunkenness and misunderstanding, and I only found a remote likability to the whole cast of players. Pynchon creates characters, so many of them in fact, it's difficult to truly make heads or tails of any of them. His world and his overstretched sentences seem bent on proving that even though the planet may be more nonsensical than say Alice’s Wonderland, there’s no reason we can’t have fun along the way. If only I could have found this more fun. But another F word comes to mind. Frustrating. Ultimately V. serves as a metaphor even for characters who aren’t, at least on the surface, searching for her or it. She may be this person or that, that country or this, this down here, or that over there. Their crackpot epic journey always seemed to have the feel of one running blindfolded down an alley before nutting a brick wall.

That leaves me now to ponder over Mason and Dixon and Against the Day, which some say is his best book. I will likely read Vineland again though before considering one of those two. ...more

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Nov 10, 2011 Madeleine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, 2013, blogophilia, our-libeary, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, richard-python

I propose that the titular "V." is neither a person nor a place but a preposition.

What, really, is more personal than a first novel? It's that all-or-nothing, balls-to-the-wall debut effort that can either send a fledgling writer plummeting to dream-shattering depths with an effort that falls flat for any number of reasons or it can be the inaugural celebration all starry-eyed young scribes dare to hope for, that which heralds a staggering new talent to a canon populated by the many great wordsl I propose that the titular "V." is neither a person nor a place but a preposition.

What, really, is more personal than a first novel? It's that all-or-nothing, balls-to-the-wall debut effort that can either send a fledgling writer plummeting to dream-shattering depths with an effort that falls flat for any number of reasons or it can be the inaugural celebration all starry-eyed young scribes dare to hope for, that which heralds a staggering new talent to a canon populated by the many great wordslingers who've scribbled their way to well-deserved immortality. (For argument's sake, we'll work under the assumption that those flimsy flavor-of-the-month bestsellers that are so in vogue for their seemingly eternal 15 minutes will, in time, be forgotten and written off as yet another regrettable mistake born of groupthink's lapse in judgment while these truly remarkable feats of literature persist through the ages.)

If one is to write what one knows, how daunting must it be to know so much about such a wide range of complicated topics -- minute historical details of a time one either never experienced or was simply too young to fully digest, regardless of youthful precociousness; engineering equations requiring mathematical acrobatics and a more than adequate grasp on physics; an insider's take on the naval experience; an innate understanding of how to perfectly mix high-minded concepts and lowbrow humor with a dash of poetic lyric -- and attempt to whittle it all down into a tome that won't crush potential readers under the weight of both the volume itself and the awe-inspiring ideas roiling within?

The little we do know about literature's most elusive enigma points to pieces of Pynchon being flung along the narrative's parade route like confetti, adding flashes of biographical color to his intricately structured and beautifully written first novel that pits the animate against the inanimate and the internal self against the external veneer (and has the best-ever bonus of an Ayn Rand stand-in reduced to baby-talk in the presence of a pwecious widdle kittums-cat?). Aside from what can only be thinly veiled allusions to his Cornell days with Richard Fariña and their cult of Warlock -- regarding the Generation of '37: "And we did like to use Elizabethan phrases in our speech"; "A farewell celebration for Maratt on the eve of his marriage"; "Dnubietna leapt up on the table, upsetting glasses, knocking the bottle to the floor, screaming "Go to, caitiff!" It became the cant phrase for our "set": go to."; "The pre-war University years were probably as happy as he described, and the conservation as "good."", to say nothing of the nod to a novel called Existential Sheriff -- the internal conflicts of the writer seem to be scattered throughout V. like a breadcrumb trail back to the source himself.

Because Pynchon has be one conflicted dude. To be a notoriously private man juggling such derision for the spotlight with the compulsion to write for unseen but rabid fans, to churn out maddeningly, densely obscure works that are nevertheless guaranteed to meet both critical and commercial success (and increase sales of Excedrin in the following months), to posses such finely tuned right and left brains that he can be considered nothing less than an engineer-poet in his own right, to walk such a fine line between historical fictions and fictional histories -- is it any wonder that a man so in touch with dueling perspectives would build his first novel on the foundation of This v. That? ...more

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Nov 16, 2008 Jimmy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

"A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words-"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"-pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to ordered in "A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: "Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic." It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words-"events seem"; "seem to be ordered"; "ominous logic"-pronouncing them differently, changing the "tone of voice" from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces."

As wartime paranoia, obsessiveness, elusiveness, and ambiguity all seem to be trademark characteristics of Thomas Pynchon's more epic narratives, it's easy enough for the reader to constantly stumble upon these intentionally scattered, meta-clues. Because his novels cover such a broad realm of subjects, while proposing a very unique, and humorous philosophy of history, the connections and transitions of V.'s hodgepodge of vignettes concerning a rich tapestry of characters struggling with both World Wars becomes more and more apparent as the "story" reaches its conclusion. Overall, this passage seems to function as an accurate metaphor for what it feels like to read V..

With his eagerly anticipated seventh novel coming out in August of this year, V. now stands as one of his more accessible works, not to mention a fascinating example of his writing to look back upon in retrospect. Benny Profane is the archetypal Pynchonian schlemihl; an endearing protagonist, merely trying to get by as the rest of the world struggles obsessively with finding existential meaning in a universe full of closed systems. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity's Rainbow would later act as a more carefully constructed version of this character. While it's true that not all of Pynchon's protagonists are slackers simply looking for a good time, they still function as tour guides who offer a more or less objective view of the events taking place. Even Herbert Stencil who exists as sort of an opposite of Profane, still shares a set of common characteristics, namely, humility or humanity. Call it what you will.

We follow Profane after just getting out of the navy, living in New York. He falls in with a crowd of bohemians and drifters referred to as the Whole Sick Crew. This group resembles the social crowd in the Recognitions as well as characters belonging to any standard party scene in a beat novel (albeit far more tolerable, and acting as intentional parodies). Profane loafs around, finds a job hunting alligators in the sewers of New York. After shooting Stencil in the ass on one of his jobs more characters enter the picture, and we are introduced to Stencil's obsessive quest to find the elusive V., a sort of character that his father before him had been fascinated with. From there the narrative drifts back and forth between historical episodes set during the tail end of the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th.

Pynchon's sympathies have always been directed at the marginalized, poor, oppressed, idealistic, liberal, etc. Even when he sketches portraits of his capitalist, fascist, hateful villains, he still manages to show their early development from wide-eyed, idealistic dreamer to avaricious monster, while avoiding a sort of idealistic bias because he presents the reader with the inherent weakness and hypocrisy of his liberal heroes just as well. Gaddis did the same thing with Wyatt Gwyon and Edward Bast, albeit both met more morbid, Faustian ends.

V. functions as a metaphor for the late twentieth century, synthetic dehumanization, which has now become one of the more blatant examples of postmodern theorizing, but in 1961 this all must have read as more of a prescient idea. Several episodes in the book, as ambiguous as they are, sort of portray "her" as an unattainable object of desire. The fourth chapter entitled "In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job" is the earliest introduction to this theme. Naturally, Shoenmaker the man who performs this operation, later to become her insensitive lover is the first sort of villain to appear. Robots modeled after humans appear later on. Profane has a particularly profound and hilarious conversation with one of them. Pynchon utilizes this theme as a way of revealing how human beings desire this sort of mechanical, empty ontology, as a way of escaping their own horrific human condition. Once again, this is why Profane's character is so very important. He exemplifies the human spirit. In his lackadaisical approach to life, he achieves what is of the utmost importance to Pynchon. The ability to merely exist, and deal, regardless of whatever sort of astronomical terror will abound. Another reason why his own unique brand of historical fiction functions so well. What's more horrifying than the first half of the twentieth century?

...more

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Apr 16, 2015 Sean Blake rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Thomas Pynchon... twenty six years old... first novel... twenty six... first novel... twenty six?

Reads like The Adventures of Tintin on hallucinogens. Full of great comic scenes mixed with political espionage and paranoia amidst philosophical comments on the nature of politics, religion, death, time, sexuality and war. V. is undeniably complex and I can admit that there were moments of mind numbing confusion, but the book is so beautifully written that you just go for the ride. It's a haunting a Thomas Pynchon... twenty six years old... first novel... twenty six... first novel... twenty six?

Reads like The Adventures of Tintin on hallucinogens. Full of great comic scenes mixed with political espionage and paranoia amidst philosophical comments on the nature of politics, religion, death, time, sexuality and war. V. is undeniably complex and I can admit that there were moments of mind numbing confusion, but the book is so beautifully written that you just go for the ride. It's a haunting and frequently hilarious postmodern satire.

V., to me, represents enlightenment, or finality. The quest itself is a long journey, hence the time and globe spanning nature of the story. The book itself is like a series of interconnecting short stories that sweeps through the majestic settings of New York, Paris, Malta, Egypt, Africa and Alexandria. The nature of V seems nurturing, motherly and caring in times of stress and suffering. Pynchon is operating on a metaphysical plain, where particles and matter can be seen and felt and the world is different from our own 20/20 vision. V is eventually seen, felt and experienced for those who are willing to take the necessary steps. Too many times are we fed little slices of fear from the characters who contemplate the nature of dying, growing old, separation from mans ignorance. These men in search of V are, in some way, in search of an ego death, to cure their fears in the face of God, a maternal presence of spirit, a being of upmost enlightenment.

Obviously, there is so much more packed into this near 500 page novel, but that's what I got out of it first time around. Political theory is examined extensively through different countries and characters. Sexuality and youth seems prevalent within The Whole Sick Crew. There are some comments on the Christian Church and Christianity in general. Freudian psychology, science and mathematics pop up and colonialism is touched on as well.

Or you could be a schlemihl and take Benny Profane's approach: "I haven't learned a godammn thing." ...more

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Nov 18, 2019 Håkon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Although not nearly as perfect as some of his later works, there are many traces of Pynchon's genius in this novel. It is not as drug-induced, decadent or heartbreaking as Gravity's Rainbow, nor is it as beautiful, ambitious or creative as Mason & Dixon, not to mention as impressively human or historically conscious as Against the Day.

Pynchon's writing in this early novel, though showing early incarnations of his later works, seems unrefined and confused. There are so called "Pynchon sentences" ...more

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Aug 20, 2017 Tom Quinn rated it it was amazing

I haven't often been as excited to start a new book as I was to start V. Daddy's first Pynchon! I was eager and abuzz for a while--the man has been adjective-ized, for crying out loud. Consider the greats that have that honor. Dickensian. Kafkaesque. Vonnegut-y. What in the world does it mean to be Pynchonian? I couldn't wait to find out. And reading Pynchon's first novel felt like a good place to start.

Based on V., I'd say reading Pynchon feels dense and dream-like. There's a lot of surreal wei I haven't often been as excited to start a new book as I was to start V. Daddy's first Pynchon! I was eager and abuzz for a while--the man has been adjective-ized, for crying out loud. Consider the greats that have that honor. Dickensian. Kafkaesque. Vonnegut-y. What in the world does it mean to be Pynchonian? I couldn't wait to find out. And reading Pynchon's first novel felt like a good place to start.

Based on V., I'd say reading Pynchon feels dense and dream-like. There's a lot of surreal weirdness, and an overarching ambiguity that you must embrace to move forward. Things aren't plot-driven so much as mood-driven; characters and scenes wash over you, wave-like. Here is a world of shark-toothed sailors, bohemian subway performers, girls in need of nose jobs, captivating clocks, international espionage, sewer alligators and oracular skeletons... Sentence by sentence, Pynchon's writing is dazzling. I started dog-earing examples I might point to and quickly found myself marking every other page, feeling for all the world like an entomologist describing the diverse jeweled shells of some species of beetle:

"Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray." (15)

"He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want." (31)

"Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other?" (35)

"It was a desire he got, off and on, to be cruel and feel at the same time sorrow so big it filled him, leaked out his eyes and the holes in his shoes to make one big pool of human sorrow on the street, which had everything spilled on it from beer to blood, but very little compassion." (149)

"Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it." (158)

"For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence." (216)

Taken one after another, these elegant sentences have a soporific effect, so that by the bottom of a page it may be hard to hold onto what you read at the top. Certainly this is not a novel to rush through, and one that can frustrate with its jangling, jazz-like composition. But if you trust Pynchon to set the pace and follow along, enjoying what's laid out immediately before you, this is a remarkable novel, deep and thoughtful in a way unlike most I've read before. And as it continues on, an impressive sort of craftwork is revealed in the structure that amplifies the meaning.

4.5 stars out of 5. Truly a massive talent, but there is a streak of juvenalia here and some wholesale repeating of phrases which highlights the fact that this is Pynchon's first novel. It's a bit rough or strained in a few spots, plus there's a strange and repetitive tendency to include song lyrics. Still, what a debut! I thought of it more as an artistically-crafted piece of entertainment than an entertaining art piece (if you catch my hair-splitting drift) but then--smack!--there comes into this rollicking montage of characters and patchwork of conversations some profound insight into art, society, humankind. I am eager to read more of his oeuvre, to see what's come after he refined a bit more.

(Read in 2017, the twenty-second book of my Alphabetical Reading Challenge) ...more

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Jul 13, 2007 Dave-O rated it really liked it

Reading Thomas Pynchon's first novel is like plunging head first into a room with very little light. As the novel progresses, Pynchon regulates that light sometimes letting the reader see very clearly, narratively speaking, and other times enveloping the reader into near darkness.

The two main characters are discharged Naval officer Benny Profane the self-described "schlemiel" and Stencil, the hunter of the elusive woman/idea known only as V. Though not exact opposites, their destinies do not int ...more

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Nov 17, 2008 Nate D rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Schlemiels, adventurers, foreign agents

Recommended to Nate D by: Jeff Geisinger

Shelves: post-modernism, read-in-2008, favorites, 60s-re-de-construction

What to say of Pynchon's half-century spanning epic?

Like Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's first novel (published, I think, at an astonishing age 26) is concerned with questions of life and death, here both at the internal, personal scale of our relations to people, things, and the outer world, and on a broad international scale of war, colonialism, and political intrigue. Linking the two, Herbert Stencil, adventurer and obsessed historian, tracking the intertwined history of his British foreign off What to say of Pynchon's half-century spanning epic?

Like Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's first novel (published, I think, at an astonishing age 26) is concerned with questions of life and death, here both at the internal, personal scale of our relations to people, things, and the outer world, and on a broad international scale of war, colonialism, and political intrigue. Linking the two, Herbert Stencil, adventurer and obsessed historian, tracking the intertwined history of his British foreign office agent father and the enigmatic V., represented in various forms across 50 years in a slow progression towards the inanimate. Questions of the animate and inanimate worlds serve as central life/death dichotomy here, and the novel is filled to the brim with significant objects, automatons, prostheses, and bouts of tourism/colonialism (both of which, it seems, are joined in their ability to take a living place and convert it to small spheres of inanimacy, both literal, in a truly chilling Sudwest setpiece, and metaphorical, everywhere else people cluster around notable buildings and monuments (embodied by frequent references to mid 19th-century travel guide writer Karl Baedeker)).

Stencil himself, curiously, seems to be one of only a few characters in the teeming cast not occupying an obvious spot on an animate to inanimate continuum, as his obsessions simultaneously encompass the human and inhuman worlds (people, but lost to the unliving past). His off-the-scale foil is ultimate sad-sack ex-seamen Benny Profane, whose role as uber-schlemiel seemingly places him at both the far left position of animacy (the born bungler's natural enemy, we are told, being the inanimate objects that conspire to trip them up like so many banana peels (which, fortunately, appear nowhere in the novel -- it would just be too much)) and the deepest inanimacy of sloth and of one who, giving in to his perceived (self-created?) role, inevitably sabotages every human relationship he finds himself in. Potential Profane paramour Rachel Owlglass, on the other hand, may sit at the fulcrum and be as a result the novel's healthiest character overall.

What can be said? Lots apparently, and yet much, much more than I can possibly describe here. What matters most is that the novel is beautiful and tragic, a marvel of both clockwork convergent plotting and the ultimate nonconvergent spinout of human passions. And one which manages to be considerably more gripping and less opaque than some of the subsequent Pynchon I've read.

I've seen the book described elsewhere as "cubist". It is an accurate term, evoking both the book's violent modernism and chorus of impossible angles. Angles which, we find, are still capable of describing a human portrait. ...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: V.

Recommended to Nathan "N.R." by: Stencil

Shelves: dons-syllabus, thomas-pynchon-completioniziert, 2015-gelesen

It’s a long distance from 1963 to 2009. The prior, V.’s pub date. The later, when I thought maybe I had found perhaps the Pynchon key in Inherent Vice. I unlocked a bunch of great stuff with that key. Fantastic stuff. Stuff I dug. Stuff I got lost in. Against the Day. The newest thing. That one from the early ‘90s. I’m still waiting to see if it fits Mason & Dixon. Gravity’s Rainbow is next, but I’ve already done 2/3 of that one and know I don’t need no damn key for it.

That key doesn’t fit V..

W ...more

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Jul 04, 2013 Geoff marked it as to-read

Ignore talk below of my previously setting this aside - I am giving it try #2 and am enjoying it much more - perhaps it's the timing - it begins on Christmas Eve and the first chapters unfold during the week between Christmas and the new year... ...more

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Jul 16, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: american-20th-c, novels, fiction, post-modern

The search for the identity of V is the primary question in this masterwork from Pynchon. It is funny and tragic and crazy and totally Pynchon. I honestly cannot remember everything this book - it does not stick in my memory as much as Mason&Dixon, Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day. I mean, I loved the pleasure of reading it. But months later, I remember just the story of the genocide in Africa and some other snapshots but overall the image remains vague. Perhaps I read too much Pynchon in to ...more

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Sep 04, 2019 George rated it really liked it

“Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”

V is for Virginia, V-Note, Victory, Victoria, Vendetta, Vibration, Voice, Vision, Valletta, Voyeur, Vodka, Vieux, Villas, Villages, Voluptuous, Vainglorious, Vinegar, Vistas, Vomit, Victims, Vehicles, Veins, Vocal, Vice Versa, Voodoo, Volunteer, Virtue, Vertical, Vicious, Vanity, Vanishing, Vitality, Vacated, Ventures, Visible, Virgin, Venery, Veiled, VaudeVille, Vantage, Vegetables, Vicinity, Valley, Verge, Villiers, Violence, Vagrant, Voslauer, “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”

V is for Virginia, V-Note, Victory, Victoria, Vendetta, Vibration, Voice, Vision, Valletta, Voyeur, Vodka, Vieux, Villas, Villages, Voluptuous, Vainglorious, Vinegar, Vistas, Vomit, Victims, Vehicles, Veins, Vocal, Vice Versa, Voodoo, Volunteer, Virtue, Vertical, Vicious, Vanity, Vanishing, Vitality, Vacated, Ventures, Visible, Virgin, Venery, Veiled, VaudeVille, Vantage, Vegetables, Vicinity, Valley, Verge, Villiers, Violence, Vagrant, Voslauer, Vague, Violation, Vast, Varkumian, VelVet, Vatican, Veronica, Viennese, Violin, Vocalist, Vibes, Vultures, Volume, Vessels, Via, Vheissu, Vecchio, Vaporetto, Venus, VoVV, Veil, Veteran, Venezuelan, Vicinity, Vice, Vials, Vaulted, Vat, Vary, Vindicating, Vogt, Viola, Volcanoes, VesuVius, Votes, Vada, Void, VergeltungsVVaffe, Van, Veldschoendragers, Vera, Vogelsang, Vestiges, Vernichtungs, Vellum, Vampire, Versailles, Virility, Vibrato, Vaterliche, Vile, Valediction, Vinyl, Vittoriosa, Vulnerable, mons Veneris…V is for V.

Like the number 23 enigma, V is eVeryVVhere if you look for it, and once you see it your Vision is irreVersibly altered/altared.

In general, Pynchon’s prose is quite unique and the generous amount of songs he includes, depending on the context, sometimes feel Lynchian, like VVhen Mondaugen leaVes the communal shelter in South-VVest Africa, other times they giVe a musical Vibe (and by “musical” I mean the noun). There is an epically long sentence in chapter nine, a sentence of utter VerVe, something I VVish occurred more often, not just once.

The stories, taking place around the VVorld, including NueVa York, France, Egypt, and Malta, do not eVolVe but orbit a black hole of misinformation, noninformation, or VVhat one could simultaneously call a (non)eVent horizon. “V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth.”

There are a lot of great scenes, including the Visceral rhinoplasty, the alligator hunting in the seVVers VVhich has an eVen stranger substory about a priest VVho VVent beloVV the streets to conVert rats and VVho may have sodomized a rat VVhose name begins VVith, you guessed it, V. Alas, some scenes are not as interesting as all that and I ended up ploVVing through them to see VVhat VVould come next.

I found all the characters more or less unlikeable, but I simply cannot understand the notion of reading something in order to ‘like’ (or like like) the characters, it seems immature, VVhich is not say that I’m unable to haVe fondness for characters in noVels, it’s just that this is not a criteria for my enjoyment, and if anything, disliking characters might help me understand my oVVn misanthropy. Jokes aside, does our ‘antihero’ learn anything at the end of the noVel? VVell, this is hoVV he puts it: “Profane didn’t have to think long. ‘No,’ he said, ‘offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.’”

OVerall, this is a great first noVel, complex and richly peopled, but this is not Pynchon’s masterpiece, yet there are seeds of a masterpiece in here that I hope blossom as an arbor Vitae in GraVity’s RainboVV, VVhich VVill probably be the next Pynchon I read. Voilà! ...more

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Sep 25, 2013 Stian rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2016, owned-books

Thomas Pynchon has written some of the best pieces of English fiction that I've ever read. He projected worlds in Against the Day and in Mason & Dixon that were amazing, magical, utterly enthralling. The world he tries to project in V., however, went over my head.

The writing feels upolished, unrefined, not really the Pynchon I've grown used to. The sub-plots and digressions, which are rambling to an extreme degree even for Pynchon's standards, are less-than-stellar most of the time. Except for ...more

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Feb 03, 2008 Lane Wilkinson rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, 20th-century

EDIT: I give up again. 'V' is a travesty of juvenile puns, unconvincing dialogue, and (my own pet peeve) characters with impossibly trite names. Seriously, what gives?

EDIT: I decided to try reading it again.

have you ever had the feeling that an author is simply trying to bludgeon you over the head with abstruseness? have you ever read one of those books that all of the "serious readers" swear is an infallible masterpiece, despite its meat-fisted appropriation of the stylistic innovations of Eli ...more

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Jul 19, 2007 Mk Tantum rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: lovers of Thomas Pynchon and those who adore reading with a companion.

From this book I learned that:

a) Thomas Pynchon may be the smartest man alive.
b) Pynchon's vocabulary is one of the most extensive I've ever come across.
c) Reading Pynchon is tedious and often unpleasant.

Even with the companion and a book discussion group, reading this novel was like wading through a bog. Every time I grasped the plot, I'd lose track of Pynchon's message, and every time I caught a glimpse of the message, I lost the plot.

No wonder the man's a recluse. Talking to him must be like ...more

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Nov 28, 2007 Mariel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: yesterday didn't know either

Recommended to Mariel by: tomorrow never knows

I'm suffering from a painfully drawn out flu so I feel bad enough already. It can't be made worse by trying to review V. on gr. (If I wanna hit my head in frustration, well, it already hurts plentiful.)
V. was my first Thomas Pynchon. I chose it because it was cheapest (used). I like discounts. The notes in the margins for a college paper were fun too. I'm proud of my mercenary side. Now the self-congratulations end and I'll wrestle my mind and alligators in those mental gutters to convey why thi I'm suffering from a painfully drawn out flu so I feel bad enough already. It can't be made worse by trying to review V. on gr. (If I wanna hit my head in frustration, well, it already hurts plentiful.)
V. was my first Thomas Pynchon. I chose it because it was cheapest (used). I like discounts. The notes in the margins for a college paper were fun too. I'm proud of my mercenary side. Now the self-congratulations end and I'll wrestle my mind and alligators in those mental gutters to convey why this is one of my favorite books. Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew. (Love those guys.) Getting through life without sketching circles in the sand. Yeah, going through life not quoting the philosopher Belinda Carlisle (it's too late for me). (Slacker characters appeal to me. I have an inferiority complex. It's torture to read fantasy novel after fantasy novel about over-achievers.) He Ventures out and has another friend, Herbert Stencil (stencilling in the sand? Shutup, Mariel) who sets him on his quest for the mysterious Victoria. I'm not gonna win this battle. There's no Victoria for me. It's gonna eat me alive. (Shit, maybe I need to consult that kid's notes.) (Because I never shutup: we'll get a "V" on our paper. V for venarial diseased.)
My pet alligator wants me to write that this book is about alligators who live in the sewers of New York City. (Her name is Gatorella. I can tell she is a she because of the bow on top of her head. Gators are reptiles and therefore don't have penises. Not that I checked.) (Could've been mutated into pizza loving ninjas in those sewers where people dump all manners of things like radioactive chemicals, in addition to taking a dump, after all. Anything is possible.) Shutup, you cold-blooded monster. It is not! There are alligators in the book though, those mythic gators flushed down the sewers when their humans (rightfully!) grew tired of them. I remember vividly reading Benny's time in those sewers, hunting and feeling hunted, not just by toilet reptiles but by nagging thoughts of right and wrong. (Gatorella says she wants to flush my review down the toilet.)
Argh. Yeah, it's dense and rambling and worth it for the spending of the time. Benny Profane, Stencil and the poet Fausto. V. connects to them as a circle: round and round unprogressively. And a line, like a connecting thread between them, because Pynchon does get somewhere about history and how it fucks with us. History doesn't make sense, and only rarely do we get to see the little man (or angel) it made in the snow. It takes its toll. Any place, any time.
It's easier to review books one doesn't like. Like breaking up with someone and you can name some reason to explain everything away (if it doesn't cut it. It just is what it is, is all) and explaining love is really hard to do if you're me. I like to ramble. I like reading the ramblings and looking for the happy and sad moments of clarity in the engaging messes. I know I felt something. That's love for me. Now I'll get eaten because Benny didn't kill all those gators.
p.s. I like the Sarah Silverman joke about getting raped by a doctor being bittersweet for a Jewish girl. Reminded me of Rachel. ...more

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Aug 21, 2015 J.L. Sutton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Thomas Pynchon's V is one of my favorite novels (it's on my rotating list of favorites which also includes Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and a few others). Describing it is next to impossible (for me at least). V seems like it's about so many things, but when you stop to think about it, it's not about any of those things at all, but something else. The main protagonists include Benny Profane, Rachel Owlglass, Stencil, a group of artists known as the Whole Sick ...more

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Oct 21, 2015 Paul Dembina rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Seems to be a book of 2 separate (although related parts):

1) The present (well, as of the time the book was written) involving a rag-tag set of characters centred on a group of US Navy sailors (probably based on Pynchon's own stint in the navy)
2) A series of flashbacks to periods from late 19th century up until the end of the 2nd World War, at various locations around the Mediterranean

For me not classic Pynchon, it shows signs of the greatness to come with some hints of the humour and wackiness ...more

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Jan 08, 2017 Mattia Ravasi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prMAv...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

A puzzling but glorious read that is, paradoxically enough, both breath-taking fast and extremely broody, thrilling and self-absorbed. It will require quite a lot of dedication to be fully enjoyed. ...more

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Dec 04, 2020 Supreeth rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, books-i-own, fiction, 2020, postmodern

For once, these one-lined reviews on the cover has it right. I doubt if people actually read the book before writing those lines/words : Fantastic, soul-crushing, zeitgeist, terrifying, razor-sharp—It might just be anything for any book and could just be right. For all these 496 pages I didn't care for who or what V. is, but there hadn't been an enjoyable read as this one. I should've started Pynchon with this one and moved to Gravity's Rainbow. I'd have to reread Mondaugen's chapter again and m ...more

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Dec 29, 2018 Ian Scuffling rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, print-aint-dead, read-in-2018

Wherein a young Thomas Pynchon writes a post-war Moby-Dick-esque epistemological grail quest wherein the veiled titular grail, V., is a stand-in for Melville's leviathan, and the whole-ness is unseen thru obscurity, omission, chaos, conspiracy and uncertainty rather than the vastness of its size and the shifting nature of metaphor, language and humanity.

Besides, Vineland and Slow Learner, I'm a versed Pynchonite, so it's funny that I had yet to read his first. But having read so many of his othe ...more

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Dec 31, 2015 Daniel Chaikin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

I spent last night thinking about this book when I should have been sleeping. That's a far cry from where I was a few weeks ago, lost in Cairo and ready to toss the e-book...and where I was again in Florence. Namibia was terribly disturbing, but I had to respect the effort. Malta was a bit slow too. But Pynchon never lost me for a second in Paris and when he got back to Malta again, I was fully engaged

What the hell am I talking about, you might ask, if you haven't read this. (And probably you ha I spent last night thinking about this book when I should have been sleeping. That's a far cry from where I was a few weeks ago, lost in Cairo and ready to toss the e-book...and where I was again in Florence. Namibia was terribly disturbing, but I had to respect the effort. Malta was a bit slow too. But Pynchon never lost me for a second in Paris and when he got back to Malta again, I was fully engaged

What the hell am I talking about, you might ask, if you haven't read this. (And probably you haven't??) The real appeal for most of this book for me was Benny Profane, who lived a life on equal with his wonderful name. Just out of the Navy, he spent 1956 in the Virginia naval world and in the New York City underworld, until he graduated to the Whole Sick Crew, a crowd of very hippie-like eccentric, entertaining and generally useless souls (and also Rachel). The other leg of the V-ish plot includes the travelogue above and tried every which way to shake me off the book. Herbert Stencil searches for V., a woman of his father's generation, but also many other undefined and generally unobtainable mysteries. He takes us through the travelogue above, generally, by recreating other peoples stories of V. Pynchon just tries too hard in the early parts of these sections. It feels like he's showing off and it's very hard to take him seriously or care. But it pays out in the end. Eventually I not only adored the tragic lady V. but then sat wondering about all the different variations that V might be. I'm still wondering, even as I know there is no answer...I hope there is no answer.

So a gem of sorts comes out of this sometimes charming, sometimes just all too smart tangled mess.

V, by the way, could be Valletta, Malta, or Vesuvius, or many other things, but notably also a V2 rocket, which connects this book firmly with Gravity's Rainbow (which I haven't read. This is my first book by Pynchon). The rocket gets one very subtle mention. But I took it and ran. My head thinks Pynchon is, in 1963 and before, fretting about the modern world and all its destructive technology, with V2 rocket standing in for a nuclear missile. Profane yo-yo's, but he frets everything inanimate and V gets progressively more and more inanimate herself as she loses an eye and a few limbs. Humans are building and building and killing everything and Pynchon is trying to make sense of it. But it's not that simple. So he was V and we wonder. Mind you, my head could be a bit high on some Benny (a slang term for Benzedrine, an amphetamine).

This is a quick a review. Maybe I should have taken more time and been more careful. I can see I missed more than I covered. But, these moods are temporary things. So, posting as is.

...more

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Dec 15, 2015 Simon Robs rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Well well well, here we (I) are/am again in that penumbral off-kilt offing into the vortex of Pynchon-land where everything is or is not what it seems 'cause the seams don't quite gather, opposites, while apposite gather nicely to one another. I (we) who enter this realm know one for sure thing: there can be no pellucid "review" per se to this or any other "P" novel due to its [by design?] complex reconditity, its various IT factor of exponential entendre, its plethora of wackily named wacky cha Well well well, here we (I) are/am again in that penumbral off-kilt offing into the vortex of Pynchon-land where everything is or is not what it seems 'cause the seams don't quite gather, opposites, while apposite gather nicely to one another. I (we) who enter this realm know one for sure thing: there can be no pellucid "review" per se to this or any other "P" novel due to its [by design?] complex reconditity, its various IT factor of exponential entendre, its plethora of wackily named wacky characters, its scope of theme and historiography, its sheer density of layer upon layer spun in centrifuge and splattered like a Pollack parabolic in calf's blood and fingered signed. It simply doesn't scan to logic of plot. But so but, what can we (I) do but stab a make onit, right. So then here's a go and let fly shall we?

The book which preceded this in me reading trek was: "The Man Without Qualities". V.'s main "squeeze" (protag.) one Benny Profane a self proclaimed schlemiel might better have fit the glove of that hand than that nebulous "Ulrich" of former, period piece (dud according to me) book. Benny's a schlemiel and/or shmuck from stem to stern, a nautical navy cast-off "yo-yo-ing" his haphazard way throughout this yarn of a faux detective sort novel where "V." is not nor ever fully to be illumed in that always shadowed Pynchonian foreground. Chiaroscuro is his chosen method albeit as he paints realism within these confines describing things accurately with precision like a surgeon's rhinoplasty or historical events post WW1 (and years later) on the island of Malta, Italy. Pynchon zooms in zooms out, he swaps eras and dabs liberally a touch here a splotch there. V., is an ongoing enigma, she sometimes a girl/woman/place/theme (?) - hey, last night's VMA awards show had that conspiratress Beyoncé fashion her on-stage entourage (as viewed from above) into a "Venus" symbol - this would scan nicely into the web of V. paraphernalia were it warped and wefted in, wha?; just sayin' - it's not so out there that it couldn't be in there.

So and so, "V.", is the first of TRP's several novels that, having read them all I now see as connected, by recurring characters, themes, paranoiac disturbance and arch tounge-in-cheek wackiness including his penchant for song lyrics and 'singling up lines.' I read this time through armed with a sensibility of known unknowns, abstract assuredness of NOT needing or wanting to connect (for sure) any dots (splatters) but rather to sit quietly, engulfed into the murky cloud of "animate AND inanimate" matter - this go more ready for recognition, more attuned to ah-ha moments but still, like a child at an old-time candy counter mesmerized by choice of what gooey substance I'll select to mac my maw. It's a pot store and it's legal! Ima gonna smoke and Ima gonna inhale. Bring on Oedipa Maas!

...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Cymru Roberts rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: pynchon, 20th-century-american

Thomas Pynchon is supposed to be a premier American author. When deciding which book of his to read first, I took some advice from a reviewer and picked up V. V. is Pynchon's first novel, and according to the reviewer, it is shorter and easier than his most famous book, Gravity's Rainbow. Taking this into consideration, it was an ominous sign when I lifted V. from the library shelf to find it so thick. Clocking in at 547 pages, I knew I had a wordpuker on my hands.

Then we get to the names. The n ...more

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Sep 22, 2016 Stela rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: unfinished

After 70 pages or so that bored me silly I decided to give it up. I know the author was young (a mere 26 if I remember correctly) but this does not completely justify the sponge-like absorption of so many and so different influences (from Heller to Joyce and Virginia Woolf and magic realism and so on), that cannot really talk to each other so that the narrative seemed to me like a fabric whose threads were all cut and left hanging.

Maybe, another time (another life) I will try to read a maturity ...more

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May 26, 2017 Loring Wirbel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The quandary: Would a full five-star ranking tend to reduce the luster of five for Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day, or does a ranking automatically take into account a certain grade inflation allowed for youthful indiscretions? After all, for a Pynchon not yet 30 to accomplish such a degree of research into pre- and post-WW1 Europe, in a time well before Google searches, seems astonishing.

My solution is to address V. the way Thomas Jefferson addressed his copy of the Holy Bible: carry along The quandary: Would a full five-star ranking tend to reduce the luster of five for Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day, or does a ranking automatically take into account a certain grade inflation allowed for youthful indiscretions? After all, for a Pynchon not yet 30 to accomplish such a degree of research into pre- and post-WW1 Europe, in a time well before Google searches, seems astonishing.

My solution is to address V. the way Thomas Jefferson addressed his copy of the Holy Bible: carry along a pen-knife, and slice pages from the Bible when he found passages he disagreed with. My own abridged V. might excise most of the book that took place in 1955-56 in Norfolk and New York. I'm not dispensing with any worth for Benny Profane or Pig Bodine, particularly for the time Benny spent under the streets and in the sewers of New York chasing albino alligators. When I first read this novel in high school, the adventures of the Whole Sick Crew represented the core of the book. Since then, I've grown too grumpy and old to care about the mind-altering adventures of dissolute youth. Except for the rare lucid moments of Hunter S. Thompson, where a spate of gettin' fucked up actually seems to lead somewhere, the manic parties of Pynchon's Crew, Kerouac's Beats, Brad Easton Ellis's brat pack, etc. ad infinitum, bore the hell out of me.

By contrast, the older Stencil, Godolphin, Maijstral seem on to something in a more direct sense in their quest for V., who I take to be a witch (with familiar) guarding the underworld. Fashoda, Florence, Valetta are the strings that matter, both for the novel in its own right, and as a precursor for Gravity's Rainbow. In fact, Kurt Mondaugen's tales of Namibia in 1924 seem to be a necessary prelude to Pynchon's later masterpiece, making V. a prerequisite that can't be skipped. The Pynchon neophyte may well want to retain all the intervening 1955-56 chapters of wild living, simply to rest from the dense poetry of the chapters from earlier points in time. And since all those earlier points come to a partial head with the Suez Crisis of November 1956, one could argue that every word in this novel was necessary.

For most readers, the occasional senseless party will serve as a break from trying to figure out what the hell Pynchon is talking about, anyway. If the book is concluded without its critical 1919 epilogue, my younger self would count the most important passage to be Benny Profane's final admission that "Offhand, I'd say I haven't learned a goddamned thing." These days, I'd be more inclined to give weight to Brenda Wigglesworth's embarrassing free-verse poem on the page previous, which seems to summarize the 20th century and the search for V. fairly well.

One visible factor was notable in this reprise reading of V. Many analyses of Gravity's Rainbow compare plot structures to a rocket's parabolic path. There's another possible parabola present in Pynchon's first novel. In this novel, the young Pynchon displays a compassion and caring that is sweet and often a bit maudlin. By The Crying of Lot 49, much is conspiratorial and full of hurt. Of course, Gravity's Rainbow is the peak of the rocket's trajectory in fear, paranoia, and a feeling that human presence on this planet will never resolve itself well. But by the time we move on to Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Bleeding Edge, Pynchon has returned to the idea that compassion is acceptable and happy endings are occasionally possible. While we can't say V. has a happy ending, the young Pynchon does give us signs of hope that are not revisited until Pynchon is 60, 70, and 80. That makes his first novel a fine place to start. ...more

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About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American writer based in New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963 ...more