An expansive, erratic novel, Thomas Pynchon’s V. tracks two protagonists, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, in part foils to each other: Profane lacks purpose, and Stencil has all-consuming purpose. The two perform alongside a larger cast of characters—Pig Bodine, a bawdy, AWOL sailor; Paola Maijstral, the vertex to a love-triangle (or love-wheel, where all spokes point to her); Rachel Owlglass, an adventurer at heart, curbed by her white-picket-fence upbringing; McClintic Sphere, a philosophical, jazz musician; Roony and Mafia Winsome, a troubled husband and wife; and dozens more—set against a 1950s America, as each reconcile themselves to war, technology, and hedonism.
Benny Profane, a discharged US Navy sailor, is Pynchon's aimless hero: he finds kinship in mollusks. He spends life “yo-yoing,” following whim, resigned to fate, and being pulled along by women like Rachel Owlglass and Paola Maijstral. On such a leash, he finds himself in New York City, amidst a social scene of uninspired artists: The Whole Sick Crew, they’re called. Rachel, his on-again, off-again lover tries to force purpose into his life—helping him to secure employment, to find a home in Manhattan, to maybe even get him to lose some weight!—but Profane is too comfortable playing the bum. As his narrative takes him from hunting alligators in the sewers, to week-long barhops, to talking existentialism with scientific test dummies, to stealing a set of rare dentures, one thing remains constant: Profane is maybe-just-actually fine spending his life a yo-yo.
Herbert Stencil, the son of a British secret agent, has devoted the entirety of his life to a forlorn investigation—the search for an unnamed woman, mentioned in his father’s journals, referred to only by her first initial: V. Through his father’s writings, and his own obsessive sleuthing, Herbert Stencil reconstructs some version of V.’s life, accurate or not, taking the reader across continents, and across decades: to Cairo, Egypt, 1898, where two spies duel; to Florence, Italy, 1901, where an Italian hustler attempts to steal The Birth of Venus; to South Africa, 1922, where German expatriates carelessly carouse during a native Bondelswaartz uprising; to Malta, WWII, where a young poet chronicles the island’s bombardment; to Paris, France, 1913, where a young ballerina finds odd-love with an older woman: V. With Stencil's "histories" interpolated throughout Benny Profane's New York saga, Herbert Stencil’s investigation takes the reader through the brambles of metaphor and red-herring, and metaphorical red-herring, all in search of one woman…or rat…or country…he’s not exactly sure.
Amid Profane and Stencil's narrative arcs—which may be better described as narrative "lines," for it's hard to argue that either undergoes significant character change—amid these narratives, Thomas Pynchon thematically explores the dangers and excesses of twentieth century America. Benny Profane, for example, is in constant fear of the inanimate world: being a klutz, he sees any inanimate object as a potential hazard—whether a missed bus or untied shoelace. Moreover, in a cynical portrayal of human agency, Pynchon regularly likens Benny Profane to something inanimate: a "thing" that doesn't will. In fact, while Profane works as a night guard in a scientific research facility, a test dummy tells Profane: humans don't have "far to go" until they're just test dummies, too. In Herbert Stencil's narrative, Pynchon questions the human search for meaning—our constant want of order, in a frequently chaotic world. Is this a futile search, as indicated by Herbert's inability to find V.? Is it necessary, all the same? One character, Fausto Maijstral, a Maltese poet, suggests that the ordering of chaos (even if untruthful) is the necessary role of the artist. Pynchon's novel contains both order and chaos, and it is a choice for each reader whether to search for order, or simply accept the chaos.
