V.

V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon published in 1963, concerning the journey of discharged U.S. Navy sailor Benny Profane through a decadent group of artists in 1956, along with the attempt of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to locate the mysterious woman he knows only as V. Considered to be a masterpiece, and one of the most important (and first) post-modern books.

V. is considered by some to be the first book of a Pynchon "trilogy," based primarily on the occurrence of the letter "v" in the title. Books two and three are Gravity's Rainbow (which is, to a large extent about the V-2) and Vineland.

The novel more-or-less alternates between chapters devoted to a 1956 plot centered around Benny and a generation-spanning plot centered around Stencil and V. herself (or various approximations to her). The Benny chapters constitute a single story, relatively light on plot, set in 1956 (with a few minor flashbacks). Each of the Stencil/V. chapters is set at a different point in time, and it is only after reading two or three of them that one is liable to see Stencil, V., and to a lesser extent Stencil's British spy/diplomat father as the thread holding these together. The two stories increasingly come together in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a "V", as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta. As a result, a reader who comes to the book unaware of this structure is typically about halfway through the book before having an inkling of what these chapters are doing in a single novel.

The Stencil chapters are:

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: the eight points of view are each imagined by Stencil as he reconstructs -- we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture -- this episode.

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 placename "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, or even (one character jokes) Venus.

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; Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.

chapter eleven
Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

Fausto Maijstral, Maltese underground resistance fighter during World War II writes a long letter to his daughter Carla, who figures in the Benny Profane story; the letter comes into Stencil's hands. The letter includes copious quotations from his 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 while children play around her.

chapter fourteen
V. in love

In this chapter V. - if V. it is - is entranced with a young ballerina, Mélanie l'Heuremaudit. The story centers around a riotous ballet performance, almost certainly modeled in part on the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's 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

As the British 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 part of a schematic for a band-pass filter.)ja:V.

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