synopsis:

It's Christmas Eve, 1955, and ex-seaman Benny Profane - "a schlemihl and human yo-yo" - is back in Norfolk, Virginia, with some old Navy buddies and Paola Maijstral, the enigmatic barmaid from Valletta, Malta. By January, he and Paola are in New York City with a group of wastrels self-styled The Whole Sick Crew; and Profane roams the streets and the sewers (hunting alligators) of a city that seems to just bounce him back in forth. In the meantime, Herbert Stencil - questing son of a dead British Foreign Office man - has been, since 1945, hunting for the utterly mysterious V., an unknown (perhaps unknowable) woman whom Stencil knows only from an entry in his late father's journals. And he knows, he has intuited, "that she'd been connected . . . with one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War. V. and a conspiracy."By January 1956, Stencil's search has brought him to New York City, where his and Benny Profane's paths inevitably cross. From that point of crossing, Thomas Pynchon's first novel takes readers on a wild and wonderful tour of the twentieth century and of contemporary America. Record-company and armaments executives jostle on these pages with British spies and Nazi rocket builders, dentists and plastic surgeons rub metaphoric elbows with street gangs and jazz musicians. And all the while, the world has either run down into meaninglessness or is run by a vast conspiracy that imposes a single absolute meaning on everyone.about this book:'V.' is a wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century (and of a world gone mad with despair) and of two men (one looking for something he has lost; the other never had much to lose so isn't looking for it) - and "V.," the unknown lady of the title, who may be somebody's mother or somebody's mistress.'V.' was the winner of the William Faulkner First Novel Award in 1963.