V.

Pynchon's first novel follows two threads. In the 1950s, Benny Profane, a drifting former sailor, wanders New York among a loose group of artists and misfits called the Whole Sick Crew. Meanwhile Herbert Stencil, obsessed with his late father's papers, hunts across decades and countries for a shadowy figure known only as V. Moving between comic city life and episodes from earlier European history, the book asks how people find or invent meaning, and how the modern world turns humans into things.