[1] It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as "V." It was nominated for a National Book Award.

The novel's two storylines increasingly converge in the last chapters (the intersecting lines forming a V-shape, as it were), as Stencil hires Benny to travel with him to Malta.

Here Profane meets Ploy, a short violent sailor, his musician friend Dewey Gland, and the Maltese barmaid Paola Hod.

Bar owner Mrs. Buffo begins to play a rendition of "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" to celebrate Christmas only to be immediately assaulted by Ploy and the rest of the intoxicated sailors.

The chapter opens with Rachel Owlglass confronting the plastic surgeon Shale Schoenmaker whom she accuses of manipulating her friend and roommate Esther Havitz into debt through repeated rhinoplasty.

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: Stencil imagines each of the eight viewpoints as he reconstructs—we do not know on how much knowledge and how much conjecture—this episode.

In the Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon admits he took the details of the setting ("right down to the names of the diplomatic corps") from Karl Baedeker's 1899 travel guide for Egypt.

A month later Schoenmaker visits Godolphin in the hospital while he is recovering from reconstructive surgery, discovering that an incompetent surgeon, Halidom, treated him using the archaic method that would inevitably lead to further disfigurement by infection.

Fina and Profane's relationship develops amid concerns over her status within a local mercenary street gang known as the Playboys, who see her as a spiritual figurehead.

In Florence in 1899, Victoria appears again, briefly, but so does the place name "Vheissu", which may or may not stand for Vesuvius, Venezuela, a crude interpretation of wie heißt du, translating into who are you in the German language, or even (one character jokes) Venus.

In section IV Stencil continues his investigation of the perplexing "V." (whom he now believes is either Victoria or the rat Veronica) meeting up with a Yoyodyne engineer Kurt Mondaugen.

McClintic Sphere, an alto sax player in a jazz band, returns home to his boarding house in Harlem.

The previous week, spent playing primarily for condescending, snobby Ivy League students, has left him exhausted, and he relaxes in his room with a prostitute named Ruby.

The chapter finishes out with the Whole Sick Crew hanging out in various places: Sheridan Square, the Rusty Spoon, Slab in front of his Cheese Danish No.

Benny loses his job at Anthroresearch Associates by sleeping in and not being at work to notify the attendant technician that several calamities have occurred in the lab.

Benny, unable and unwilling to get work, instead takes a self-described vacation and chooses to spend his spare time at the Rusty Spoon.

Benny and Stencil commit a robbery in perilous circumstances, and then, in late September, they embark for Malta with Paola on board the Susanna Squaducci.

As the Royal Navy mass on Malta in the early stages of the Suez Crisis, Stencil arrives with Benny in tow, searching for Fausto Maijstral.

Stencil sails off into the Mediterranean and a waterspout blows the ship up into the air, then down into the depths, not too dissimilar from the conclusion of another American masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also a sailor's story.

"[5] Tony Tanner considered the novel an exploration of the plots individuals ascribe to the ambivalent universe they have no choice but to confront, during a 20th-century period in which genuine communication between individuals has been eroded and in which ambiguous societal forces are at work (intentionally or inadvertently) towards a state of entropy; "SHROUD asks, 'Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it's started?'

"[6] Writing in The New York Times, George Plimpton called Pynchon "a young writer of staggering promise", lauding his "vigorous and imaginative style", "robust humor" and "tremendous reservoir of information".