V.

To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover

New Yorker

[Pynchon's] ambitions in V. are prodigious, enough to demand comparison less with Perelman than with the Joyce of the Circe episode of Ulysses

New York Review of Books 1963

The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation

Ian Rankin, Guardian

[Pynchon] writes richer comedy than most card-carrying comic novelists, filling his eight novels with hilarious spoofs, outlandish characters, screwball dialogue and zany scenarios

Guardian

Screwballs chase alligators in sewers in a chaotic and worlwide chase for V., while literary styles, brilliant and bizarre, chase each other

Books and Bookmen

The book sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. Few books haunt the waking or sleeping mind, but this is one

Time

Mr Pynchon writes with enormous skill and virtuosity

Times Literary Supplement.