V.

V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." It was nominated for a National Book Award.

Plot summary

The novel alternates between episodes featuring Benny, Stencil and other members of the Whole Sick Crew (including Profane's sidekick Pig Bodine) in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks), and a generation-spanning plot that comprises Stencil's attempts to unravel the clues he believes will lead him to "V." (or to the various incarnations thereof). Each of these "Stencilised" chapters is set at a different moment of historical crisis; the framing narrative involving Stencil, "V.", and the journals of Stencil's British spy/diplomat father threads the sequences together. The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.

Chapter One: "In which Benny Profane, a schlemil and human yo-yo, gets to an apocheir"

The opening chapter is set in Norfolk, Virginia Christmas Eve, 1955. Benny Profane, a recently discharged seaman, is at a local sailor bar called the "Sailor's Grave" in which every waitress is named Beatrice and the beer taps are rubber model breasts that the sailors suck on. Here Profane meets Ploy, a short violent sailor, his musician friend Dewey Gland, and the Maltese barmaid Paola Hod. Bar owner Mrs. Buffo begins to play a rendition of It Came Upon the Midnight Clear to celebrate Christmas only to be immediately assaulted by Ploy and the rest of the intoxicated sailors. The disorder triggers a raid by the military police. Pig Bodine, Paolo, Dewey Gland and Profane escape the chaos to Pig's apartment.

Chapter Two: "The Whole Sick Crew"

The chapter opens with Rachel Owlglass confronting the plastic surgeon Shale Shoenmaker who she accuses of manipulating her friend and roommate Esther Havitz into debt through repeated rhinoplasty. Shoenmaker responds by entering into a monologue on the nature of Jewish women and the nature of appearance.

Section II is set during a party at Rachel's apartment attended by the "Sick Crew", Paolo, Esther, and Debb. This section introduces the character Herbert Stencil, a troubled man who is obsessed with his father's mysterious death in Malta and the identity of "V", a woman mentioned in his father's journal.

Chapter Three: "In which Stencil, a quick-change artist does eight impersonations"

This chapter, set among the British community in Egypt toward the end of the 19th century, consists of an introduction and a series of eight relatively short sections, each of them from the point of view of a different person. The eight sections come together to tell a story of murder and intrigue, intersecting the life of a young woman, Victoria Wren, the first incarnation of V. The title is a hint as to how this chapter is to be understood: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs—we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture—this episode. This chapter is a reworking of Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose", which was first published in 1961 and is collected in Slow Learner (1984). In the Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down to the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt. Stencil's reconstruction follows the same basic conflict as "Under the Rose", but it gives the non-European characters much more personality.

Chapter Four: In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job

Section I details the history of Shale Schoenmaker, M.D. and how he began his career as a plastic surgeon. During World War One he eagerly enlists in the A.E.F. hoping to become a pilot but, is instead given a position as an engineer. While serving he witnesses Evan Godolphin, a handsome pilot whom he idealized, become horribly disfigured during an air raid. A month later Shoenmaker visits Godolphin in the hospital while he is recovering from reconstructive surgery, discovering that an incompetent surgeon, Halidom, treated him using the archaic method that would inevitably lead to further disfigurement by infection. This event traumatizes Shoenmaker, causing him to now see it as his mission to help people like Godolphin, a conviction that slowly decays over time.

Chapter Five: In Which Stencil Nearly Goes West with an Alligator

Only marginally part of the Stencil/V. material, this chapter follows Benny and others, as Benny has a job hunting alligators in the sewers under Manhattan. It figures in the Stencil/V. story in that there is a rat named "Veronica" who figures in a subplot about a mad priest — Father Linus Fairing, S.J. — some decades back, living in the sewers and preaching to the rats; we hear from him in the form of his diary. Stencil himself makes a brief appearance toward the end of the chapter.

Chapter Seven: She hangs on the western wall

In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the place name "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, a crude interpretation of wie heißt du, translating into who are you in the German language, or even (one character jokes) Venus. The chapter also revolves around an attempted burglary of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus by Hugh Godolphin through the Venezuelan consulate.

Chapter Eight: In which Rachel gets her yo-yo back, Roony sings a song, and Stencil calls on Bloody Chilitz

The chapter begins with Benny Profane, freshly unemployed after being laid-off from sewer-alligator hunting, in search of a job in Manhattan. After briefly contemplating the nature of money on a park bench, he, by chance, looks at an advertisement issued by The Time/Space Employment Agency. Once arriving at the agency he finds, much to his annoyance, that the secretary is his former lover Rachel Owlglass. In section IV Stencil continues his investigation of the perplexing "V." (who he now believes is either Victoria or the rat Veronica) meeting up with a Yoyodyne engineer Kurt Mondaugen.

Chapter Nine:Mondaugen's story

Kurt Mondaugen, who will appear again in Gravity's Rainbow, is the central character in a story set in South-West Africa (now Namibia) partly during a siege in 1922 at which one Vera Meroving is present, but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony.

Chapter Eleven

Fausto Maijstral, Maltese civilian suffering under the German bombardment and working to clear the rubble during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Paola, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from Fausto's diary. Besides the place name Valletta, V. figures in the story as an old — or possibly not-so-old — woman crushed by a beam of a fallen building.

Chapter Fourteen: V. in love

In this chapter V. is entranced by a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers on a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The performance centers on a virgin sacrifice by impalement. The young ballerina fails to wear her protective equipment and actually dies by impalement in the course of the performance; everyone assumes her death throes simply to be an uncharacteristically emotional performance.

Chapter Sixteen: Valletta

"Kilroy" schematic. Technically, a band-pass filter.

As the Royal Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral. (As always, Kilroy was here first, and Pynchon proposes a novel origin for the face: that Kilroy was originally a schematic for part of a band-pass filter.)

Epilogue

The last chapter is a flashback to Valletta when Stencil, Sr. was still alive. After World War I he is sent to Malta to observe the various crises going on involving the natives and their desire for independence. He is implored by Maijstral's wife (who is pregnant with Fausto)^[1] to relieve him of his duties as a double agent because she fears for his life. Stencil, Sr. meets Veronica Manganese or V and implicitly has sex with her (she is now largely made up of artificial limbs). It is revealed they had trysted in Florence after the riots. He finds out that Fausto is having an affair with her as well.

Linus Fairing is also working as a double agent for Stencil, and when he leaves for America, having tired of the life of a spy, Stencil's purpose for being in Malta is null.

V releases Stencil from her auspices and Maijstral as well.

Stencil sails off into the Mediterranean and a waterspout blows the ship up into the air, then down into the depths, not too dissimilar from the conclusion of another American masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also a sailor's story.

Characters

Major Characters

Benny Profane

The protagonist and a self-proclaimed human yo-yo.

Rachel Owlglass

A upper-class women from the affluent Five Towns on the south shore of Long Island.

Herbert Stencil

A troubled Jewish-American man who is obsessed with the identity of "V." a woman who is mentioned in his father's journal written shortly before he disappeared in Malta. Stencil speaks almost exclusively in the third person.

Minor Characters

Angel

Puerto Rican sewer alligator hunter and friend of Profane.

Fina

Angel's sister, she acts as a saint to the Playboy gang, often quelling disputes between them and other gangs over territory. In chapter seven it is heavily implied that she is raped by the same gang.

Geronimo

Slab

Melvin

Raoul

Debb Sensay

Brad

Paola Majistral

Maltese immigrant who Profane estimates to be roughly sixteen, Paolo sometime during World War II marries Pappy Hod to gain entrance to the United States.

Esther Harvitz

Rachel's Jewish roommate whom Rachel financially supports.

McClintic Sphere

Ferguson Mizolydian

A "Irish Armenian Jew" and the "laziest living being in Nueva York". Ferguson is so lethargic that the only activity that he takes part in excluding television is once a week "to fiddle around at the kitchen sink with dry cells, retorts, alembics, salts solutions."

Shale Shoenmaker, M.D.

a Jewish plastic surgeon who specializes in rhinoplasty. Shoenmaker decides to become a plastic surgeon during World War One while working as an engineer in the Aviation Section. During this time he witnesses pilot Evan Dodolphin become disfigured after a mission in which his plane was heavily damaged.

Ploy

A engineer on the mine sweeper Impulsive. Standing five feet tall in boots, Ploy has an extremely violent temperament, oftentimes attempting to start fights with the largest sailors. Ten months before the beginning of the first chapter Ploy's teeth are removed by the Navy, being replaced by a pair of dentures. Ploy entertains himself by biting barmaids at the Sailor's Grave on the buttocks.

Pig Bodine

A perverted member of the Sick Crew. Prior to joining the crew, Bodine was enlisted on the U.S.S. Scaffold where he operated a pornographic lending library and would write fetish erotica using the ship telegraph. Bodine's knees have the odd ability to lock in place allowing him to effectively sleep while standing, much to the astonishment of the navy physicians.

Kurt Mondaugen

A engineer who works at Yoyodyne who is interviewed by Stencil.

Reception

TIME wrote "In this sort of book, there is no total to arrive at. Nothing makes any waking sense. But it makes a powerful, deeply disturbing dream sense. Nothing in the book seems to have been thrown in arbitrarily, merely to confuse, as is the case when inept authors work at illusion. Pynchon appears to be indulging in the fine, pre-Freudian luxury of dreams dreamt for the dreaming. The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. What does it mean? Who, finally, is V.? Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one. Who, indeed?"^[2]

Writing in the The New York Times, George Plimpton called Pynchon "a young writer of staggering promise", lauding his "vigorous and imaginative style", "robust humor" and "tremendous reservoir of information".^[3]

In 1964, the novel was awarded a William Faulkner Foundation Award for best debut novel.

Editions

In 2012 it emerged that there were multiple versions of V. in circulation. This was due to the fact that Pynchon's final modifications were made after the first edition was printed and thus were only implemented in the British, or Jonathan Cape, edition and the Bantam paperback. The fact was forgotten soon after in the U.S., so most US editions, including the newly released eBook, follow the first printing and are therefore unauthorized versions of the text, while the British editions, which follow the first edition printed by Jonathan Cape, contain Pynchon's final revisions.^[4]

References to V. in other works

• The title of the American experimental rock band Thrice's 2005 album Vheissu refers to the book.
• The lyrics to English rock band Radiohead's 2003 song "Scatterbrain" were inspired by a passage from the novel.
• Mimi and Richard Fariña's 1965 debut album, Celebrations for a Grey Day, includes an instrumental entitled "V." which is linked directly to the novel in the liner notes.^[5]
• The Insect Trust's 1970 album Hoboken Saturday Night includes the song "Eyes of a New York Woman", with lyrics taken from the novel.
• In keeping with his V-theme, the main character in the graphic novel V for Vendetta reads the novel.
• The English band Benny Profane took their name from Pynchon's character.
• The film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension uses Pynchon's fictional defense contractor Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, introduced in this novel. This connection led to further references in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• A suite of songs on the 1969 album Volume Two by Soft Machine is titled "Esther's Nose Job," referring to Chapter 4: "In which Esther gets a nose job."^[6]
• A book with a V on the cover is mentioned as being read by Richard Katz in Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

References

External links

• V. Wiki @ PynchonWiki.com
• V. Cover Art Over Time @ ThomasPynchon.com