Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V., first published in 1963, introduces many of the recurring themes—from historical relativism to technological menace to recurring characters like Pig Bodine and Lieutenant Weissman—that will appear throughout Pynchon’s later writings. Often cited as an exemplar of postmodern literature and the American picaresque, V. is set in a 1950s, post-WWII America—with flashbacks that take the reader from an 1898 Cairo to a 1943 Malta—blending lofty philosophy with bawdy humor and even plenty of song.
Pynchon's style throughout V. is one of multiplicity. The narrative features many overlapping plot lines, and Pynchon's voice is often ironic, or, at the very least oblique; the third-person narrator moves from an omniscient bystander to an unreliable participant, without clear boundaries between the two (i.e. one of the protagonists, Herbert Stencil, speaks in the third person, and the extent to which he is or is not a narrator is left uncertain).
Pynchon began writing V. after graduating from Cornell University, whilst working as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle. The novel incorporates one of Pynchon's earlier short stories, entitled "Under the Rose," which served as the foundational structure of Chapter 3. V. was met with immediate critical acclaim: the novel won the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1963, and was nominated for a National Book Award in 1964—an award Pynchon would later win for his novel Gravity's Rainbow. When the novel was first released, George Plimpton of the New York Times Book Review called Pynchon a "young writer of staggering promise," commending Pynchon's "remarkable ability—which includes a vigorous and imaginative style, a robust humor, a tremendous reservoir of information (one suspects that he could churn out a passable almanac in a fortnight's time) and, above all, a sense of how to use and balance these talents." Comparing V. to Pynchon's later works, Alexander Nazaryan of the New Yorker wrote, "More than in the novels that would follow, the Pynchon of V. stops on occasion to let the reader appreciate the scenery […] V. has to it that elusive youthful quality of wonder: Pynchon the explorer, not yet the classifier."
