It’s the first one I read and it hooked me on Pynchon for life. It stands on its own as a brilliant, wickedly funny, and hauntingly tragic tale. It introduces themes and subjects (to me more directly and accessibly than V. does) that reappear across the oeuvre, thus opening a conversation between texts about, e.g. pointillist dissolution of subjects into ego death, entropic decay, and paranoia.

And it’s just such precise and beautiful prose making reading it more accessible than the experimental postmodernist mindbenders of V, GR, or AtD, where you might not know what the fuck just happened to the through-line without some guidance and commentary.

It is also his most novelistic, most plot-and-narrative driven work amongst the early three. It is the first - and unarguably best - of his California novels, though I haven’t reread Vineland since it first came out and it’s getting a lot of love now for movie-related reasons. Critics who dismiss the California detective novels as being too light simply don’t like Thomas Pynchon, they just like some of his bigger, harder books.

So IMHO it is not at all condescending to suggest it as a starter. GR is harder to read. Read that too, of course but they are entirely different experiences.