The nature of Thomas Pynchon's fiction has encouraged a serial view of his texts as being sequentially organized by some concatenative V-effect, from the first novel, V. (or "V1 "), then, momentarily omitting The Crying of Lot 49 , to the centrality of V-2 rockets in Gravity's Rainbow, and, nearer us and nearer "home" (its final word), to Vineland as "V3" and a more nostalgic fresco of an allegorized proto-America ( Vinland was the name given to the American continent sighted by the Vikings in the tenth century). But each time, a different estrangement takes place, according to a variable V-effect, or Pynchon's version of the Brechtian V[erfremdungs]-Effekt.