V.

V. is the first novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963 and nominated for a National Book Award.

The book alternates between two kinds of chapter. In one, Benny Profane and his friends drift through 1956: drinking, working odd jobs, hunting alligators in the sewers for the city's bounty and failing to finish any of the projects they talk about. In the other, Stencil follows the traces of a woman who keeps appearing at moments of historical crisis, from Egypt to Paris to Malta, in chapters set decades apart and connected by a V-shaped pattern that runs through them all. The two lines move towards each other, and the meeting is the point of the structure: a book about people who will not commit to anything set against a book about a man who has committed to one obsession. Pynchon's prose moves easily between slapstick, technical vocabulary and passages of historical pastiche, and the novel established the voice that his later books would elaborate. It is the earliest of his novels and the only one set mostly in the 1950s.