| Title | : | Vineland |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 3499136287 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9783499136283 |
| Language | : | German |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 480 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1990 |
An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.
Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future.
Vineland Reviews
-
Vineland is downplayed by Pynchon fans and completely ignored by curious newbies, who tend to pass over it in favour either of the big-game status of one of his doorstop meganovels, or of the appealing slenderness of The Crying of Lot 49. Shame. All his gifts and his mysteries are on display here, wrapped up in one of his most enjoyable, inexplicable, and lushly all-enveloping plots. Rereading it now, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s terribly underrated.
The essential storyline, if there is one, concerns the quest of fourteen-year-old Prairie to find her long-lost mother Frenesi, a hippy-chick revolutionary turned government informer, who has left a string of lovesick boys and girls wherever she’s been. But around this kernel Pynchon deposits layer upon layer of sub-plots, super-plots, side-plots and inter-plots until you are wading thigh-deep through new characters, new locations, new sensations, on every page.
It reads chaotically, but the chaos is intricately plotted. Pynchon is doing twenty things at once in this book, and all of them brilliantly. Prairie’s story is set in the 1980s, but the key events in Frenesi’s life happened fifteen or twenty years before that – and what Vineland is really about is what happened to that generation. How the counterculture kids of the 1960s turned into the Reagan voters of the 1980s. In that sense it’s a political novel.
OK, a political novel, all right – but that doesn’t really explain the experience of this book, does it? Because along the way we have a psychic detective investigating a Godzilla attack, we have a UFO abduction during a passenger flight to Hawaii, we have a community of kunoichi, or female ninjas, in the Californian hills, a political prison deep in a nuclear fallout shelter, a Tokyo sex auction, a community of zombie-ghosts, and a potted history of mallrats. Often these incidents are slipped in obliquely, so that you put the book down blinking, as though coming up from hypnosis, thinking vaguely – did I really read that…? Did I get that impression from the words on the page, or was I imagining something on my own initiative? Pynchon is a master at palming ideas off unseen, adding more and more dependent clauses to his sentences, pushing the key information further and further down, so that it seeps in through a kind of osmosis and, though you understand what he’s talking about, you don’t quite recall being told.
This sense of fluidity is abetted by his extraordinary ability to slip-'n'-slide time and place when you least expect it, jumping in and out of different timezones without the usual formalities but without, also, any jarringly ‘experimental’ effects. Have a look at what happens during this conversation sometime in the 1970s, where Prairie’s dad Zoyd is talking to a friend about finding somewhere to stay near Frenesi’s family:“On the one hand, you don’t want this turning into your mother-in-law’s trip, on the other hand, they might know about someplace to crash, if so don’t forget your old pal, a garage, a woodshed, a outhouse, don’t matter, ’s just me and Chloe.”
“Chloe your dog? Oh yeah, you brought her up?”
“Think she’s pregnant. Don’t know if it happened here or down south.” But they all turned out to look like their mother, and each then went on to begin a dynasty in Vineland, from among one of whose litters, picked out for the gleam in his eye, was to come Zoyd and Prairie’s dog, Desmond. By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was starting to put together a full day’s work…
Whoa, whoa, whoa, did you catch that? We just panned down to the dog for half a sentence, and before you know it we’ve followed two generations of puppies all the way through a quick ten years, so that Pynchon can now sleight-of-hand straight into a conversation in the '80s without having to do any ponderous throat-clearing of the ‘Several years later…’ variety. He pulls this shit on every page and he is GOOD at it. Most of them you won’t even notice.
Pynchon’s women, as always, are cool and concupiscent, but the horniness is balanced here – uniquely in his oeuvre – by having a wry female protagonist who is never sexualised. Prairie is unflappable, observant, the writing never patronises her – she’s one of the great teenage girls in fiction.
Frenesi, by contrast, is the archetypal Pynchonic femme fatale, replaying the author’s usual paranoid sexual fantasy of how nice girls just can’t resist the manly charms of the Asshole King, who goes here by the name of Brock Vond, a federal neofascist who’s eagerly prosecuting the Republicans’ War on Drugs. A lot of people who discuss Vineland find Frenesi’s motivation implausible – would she really throw everything away, her politics, her principles, her daughter, just because she can’t stop fucking this guy? And is Pynchon really going to hinge his entire Heath Robinson plot on such a flimsy velleity?
Yeah, he is, and the book doesn’t get enough credit for playing such a calculated move. ‘I’m not some pure creature,’ Frenesi agonises at one point, during a painful imagined break-up with a girlfriend who put her on the usual pedestal – ‘you know what happens when my pussy’s runnin' the show…’ It’s a dynamic played out in almost all his books, but the collateral resonances are nowhere made more obvious, the D/S overtones in her submission to Brock prefiguring something essential about what happened to her whole generation:Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it.
There’s the whole novel in a sentence. Does Pynchon believe it? Say rather that it’s his secret fear. That’s why it’s necessary for it to play out on the interpersonal level too, which pretty soon, given his characters, comes round to some kind of Sylvia Plathlike every-woman-adores-a-fascist deal.
Vineland is infused with a genuine, unfashionable nostalgia for the acid dreams of the Sixties, but a nostalgia tempered by the resolve to assess the roots of its failures as time went by and ‘revolution went blending into commerce’. Against these incursions all he can offer are the tried and tested defences of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scablands garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.
You can sink into this book and swim in it, and the pages will close up over your head. It’s just beautifully made – hilarious and sexy and sad and constantly provocative. And it has more to say about what the 1980s were really about than any number of Brett Easton Ellis or Martin Amis or Jonathan Coe novels can manage. Perhaps it’s not objectively his best book, but it is, for my money, his most fun. -
Pop culture is evil and the opiate of the masses so Vineland is Thomas Pynchon’s sardonic and idiosyncratic attack on pop culture.
It ain’t that I don’ have Hollywood connections. I know Ernie Triggerman. Yeah and Ernie’s been waiting years for the big Nostalgia Wave to move along to the sixties, which according to his demographics is the best time most people from back then are ever going to have in their life – sad for them maybe, but not for the picture business. Our dream, Ernie’s and mine, is to locate a legendary observer-participant from those times, Frenesi Gates – your ex-old lady, Zoyd, your mom, Prairie – and bring her up out of her mysterious years of underground existence, to make a Film about all those long-ago political wars, the drugs, the sex, the rock an’ roll, which the ultimate message will be that the real threat to America, then and now, is from the illegal abuse of narcotics?
Nostalgia for the past, daydreams of mixing up with beautiful people and all those little sweet sins tote up into something like an ideal existence…
However long one behaves as a pop culture hero, one’s life won’t turn into a movie… -
So when you think of
Pynchon you think of serious work, right? And trudgery and difficulty and obfuscation and pedanticism, and like this dizzying thing that just makes you feel unintellectual and slow for never being able to catch up, right?
Well if that is the case, you have never read
Vineland. Because oh. my. god. This book is so fucking good.
I'm not going to try to summarize or anything, because this book is too sprawling and reeling, and anyway that would be an afront to its amazingness. But look, it's got all the same basic building blocks as any Pynchon book—a million characters exhaustively historied, unfollowable plot twists, crazy ranting paranoia, incredibly phraseology, bizarre songs, sixties culture, sex and violence (in fact, large swaths are oddly comparable to Kill Bill, if you ask me)—but it's done at a much...easier level somehow. It's much more accessible, it's hilarious and warm, and you don't feel like you're in quicksand the whole time, just desperately trying to understand and keep breathing.
See, people never talk about the really unimaginable joy that soars through Pynchon's work. And beauty! I mean look, this book is tough, for sure, and I won't try to claim that I understood everything, but honestly it just doesn't matter. It's just so much fun to read. It's not work at all.
And the ending! Once I had like thirty pages left I started getting that dark foreboding feeling, you know, like there's no way he can end this satisfactorily, there just isn't enough space. I was so sure he was going to do something horrible, leaving everything messy and unfulfilling, end things like right in the middle of a sentence or something, but no! The ending was beautiful, just like the rest of the book, totally satisfying and wonderful. Jeez I loved this book. Wow. -
More accessible and more character driven than TP's other novels, this was a blast from start to finish! Compulsively funny and featuring some great crackerjack riffs, if you take the hippie movement and roll it around with a dose of political satire and then throw in some Asian ninja flicks, 80's action B-movies, wacky cartoons, spirituality, (possible extraterrestrials) and more, you kind of get Vineland. It has such crazy goings-on, and yet still carries itself in a realistic fashion, and amazingly, for Pynchon, actually made me feel something deep down inside for certain characters: there is simply more depth to them here: in particular Zoyd & Prairie. Gravity's Rainbow for me is still his best book, but I can't say I felt anything for Tyrone Slothrop. I loved the setting here too, and it just feels right, as an American writer, that Pynchon should return to American soil after the European setting of GR. The way Pynchon takes rival themes dealing with optimism (the way certain instincts survived beyond the backend of the 60s) and pessimism (the sinister authoritarianism of the Bush administration) and holds them in equilibrium throughout should be noted as one of Vineland's biggest strengths, and I'm surprised that hardly anyone would put this in their top three Pynchon novels let alone it being their favourite. 4.5/5 -
The novel transports him back to California, the country he has often visited, even lived in, but which still seems like a dream, everything too vivid, too distinct, too much to be real, the Pacific viewed from halfway up a mountain, separated into bands progressing from aquamarine to eggshell, sea transformed into sky in a series of gradations as precise as the steps in a theorem, the ever-present background hum of violence occasionally coalescing into tangible form, raised voices from the lobby, a scream, coming downstairs to see a man slumped over the front desk, blood pouring from a hole in the occipital region of his head, a cramped office where nerds take a break from creating the future to sit on the floor and drink coffee from laboratory glassware and then return to symbolic manipulations that may turn into billions of dollars which will then be stolen by smart operators more familiar with the legal aspects of stock options, mystical sex on waterbeds with girls who still call themselves hippie chicks when they are naked and speak indifferent Spanish and Japanese, Pynchon reconstructs it all in living technicolor, it is a kind of minor miracle.
-
Pynchon's most underrated, I think - a bighearted, funky read; a worthy 3rd "V" book.
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"...everybody's a hero at least once, maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."
- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
I first read Vineland about 25+ years. It was my sophomore year in college. I was idealistic and I met this guy in the college bookstore named Thomas Pynchon. Since it was my FIRST (or was
The Crying of Lot 49 my first?) Pynchon, I think I missed way more than I gained (except for the desire for MORE Pynchon). Looking back now, Pynchon for me starts to divide into his BIG GREAT novels and his funny, shorter novels.
In my brain, Vineland fits with
Inherent Vice,
Bleeding Edge,
V., and
The Crying of Lot 49. On the otherside of my Pynchon index card sits
Gravity's Rainbow,
Mason & Dixon, and
Against the Day. Obviously, there are no perfect systems here. But that is how Vineland sits for me. It was VERY good, just not GENIUS Pynchon. The slimmer, more linear, suffer/pot noir stuff seems more likely to be finished and read. But his bigger, Maximalist, juggernauts are waves that if you can catch and ride, will float you to Nirvana. The bigger the Pynchon risk, the better your chance for seeing God (or at least splitting a sub with her).
Vineland basically tells the story of how the hippies of the 60s sold out (in various ways) and moved from rejecting Nixon in the 60s to embracing Reagan in the 80s. Like most of Pynchon's novels, this one is filled to overflow with Pynchon's humor, caricatured characters with absurd names, pop culture, paranoia, and weed. I enjoyed it and if I was going to rank it against most writers it would rank high. But it is on the lower end of the Pynchon heap. -
Everybody always told me Vineland was Pynchon’s worst effort - what? No way no how, brothers and sisters, this here is an endless DNA chain or like Russian doll of embedded story after story descending and re-emerging through various strata of narratorial layers, pop culture send-ups, genre parodies, all funny as hell and twisted and ridiculous while also extremely smart and painted with mind-tweaking flights down and up imaginative spiral staircases! And there’s so much heart in this book this old cold hombre almost teared up at certain moments. Worst Pynchon? - C’mon, this is his classic Saturday night drive-in camp flick, for the mentally agitated among us, to be paired generously with Inherent Vice, and a downright lovely & insane ode to mid-20th century American popular culture - get on it.
-
If Three Should Be Five
I first read “Vineland” some time in the 90’s. Based on an imperfect recollection of it, I rated it three stars when I joined GoodReads. I’ve raised my rating to five stars, partly because of how much fun I had reading it a second time.
I can’t think of a better novel to read between now and when we emerge safely into the Post-Trump era.
Reprise and Foreshadow
“Vineland” reprises the longing and quest for an absent woman that was at the heart of
“V” (in this case, the daughter of left-wing activist parents, a “third generation lefty”, student radical, film-maker and the novel’s heroine, Frenesi Gates); it features Kommandant Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer and subsequently useful American citizen (who could have emigrated from
“Gravity’s Rainbow”); while it foreshadows the focus on the underground and anarchism that was so fundamental to
“Against the Day”. More realist than Pynchon’s previous three novels, its description of the American landscape is as detailed and expressive, usually as humorous and sometimes as sentimental as it would later be in
“Mason & Dixon”:
“The shape of the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them, repeated on its own scale the greater curve between San Diego and Terminal Island, including a military reservation which, like Camp Pendleton in the world at large, extended from the ocean up into a desert hinterland…”
"They were in a penthouse suite high over Amarillo, up in the eternal wind, with the sun just set into otherworld transparencies of yellow and ultraviolet, and other neon-sign colours coming on across the boundless twilit high plain…(381)"
“A lightning storm had appeared far out at sea and now, behind them out the window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along the horizon. Somewhere in here a stereo began to play a stack of albums from the fifties, all in that sweet intense mainstream wherein the tenor drowns of love, or, as it is known elsewhere, male adolescence.”
“Zoyd, who was driving, came at last upon a long forest-lined grade and cresting saw the trees fold away, as there below, swung dizzily into view, came Vineland, all the geometry of the bay neutrally filtered under pre-storm clouds, the crystalline openwork arcs of pale bridges, a tall power plant stack whose plume blew straight north, meaning rain on the way, a jet in the sky ascending from Vineland International south of town, the Corps of Engineers marina, with salmon boats, power cruisers, and day sailers all docked together, and spilling uphill from the shoreline a couple of square miles crowded with wood Victorian houses, Quonset sheds, postwar prefab ranch and split-level units, little trailer parks, lumber-baron floridity, New Deal earnestness. And the federal building, jaggedly faceted, obsidian black, standing apart, inside a vast parking lot whose fences were topped with concertina wire. ‘Don’t know, it just landed one night, sitting there in the morning when everybody woke up, folks seem to be gettin’ used to it.’ (317)”
This sounds like somewhere that is really there and that you’re in the passenger’s seat of the car that Zoyd is driving and you can see it, too. Whilst laughing.
Reaganomic Drug Hysteria
Published in 1990, the novel is set partly in 1969 (in cinematic flashback), but primarily in 1984, the year in which Ronald Reagan won a second term as President. It was also a time when Reagan’s economic policies (dubbed “Reaganomics”) and his “War on Drugs” (which initiates what Pynchon calls “national drug hysteria”) were in full flight. Perhaps presciently for Trump, it’s worth noting that the assassination attempt on Reagan was made just 69 days into his first term in 1981. People must have known what they were going to get.
Ironically (or maybe not), the ultimate source of the drugs was the CIA:
“Verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the US Code hath decided to control. Get me?...Notice how cheap coke has been since ‘81?”
Leaning Across the Counter-culture
It’s well known that Pynchon has always had counter-cultural sympathies. Here, they’re front and centre, as is the associated politics. Frenesi conceives of her life working in the seventies underground documentary film industry this way:
“When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colours of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally - here’s my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into my own at last...Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths…”
Student Film Collective
Frenesi belongs to a student film collective called 24fps, whose motto is:
“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgment. We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!”
I Love a Man in Uniform
Paradoxically, Frenesi has inherited a “uniform fetish” from her mother, “as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control.” She enjoys a privileged personal and financial position, because after the death of agent Weed Atman at the College of the Surf protest, she’d been compromised by FBI agent, Brock Vond (“a rebel cop, with his own deeply personal agenda, only following the orders of a repressive regime based on death”) into supplying information and film footage about other activists for a fee (in his eyes, she had good “snitch potential”):
“He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs.”
“Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?”
From New Deal to No Deal
However, come Reagan’s autumnal wind, things started to change:
“She understood that the Reaganomic axe blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash [her husband] were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume...as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real axe, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final - but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin [their son] had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence...We are digits in God’s computer…”
They go from “once carefree dopers” to drug criminals sought out by paramilitary law-enforcement agencies like the crop-destroying Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP), Brock Vond’s Political Re-Education Program (PREP) and the Ultra High-Speed Urban Reconnaissance Unit (UHURU)(one of many “Star Trek” references). Pynchon paints a picture of the Reagan government as a brutal, conniving fascist regime that repealed the New Deal and replaced it with No Deal:
“It’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it - dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity - ‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.’”
Reagan attacks the counter-cultural underground as if it were a vicious alien virus intent on destroying the American mainstream. The residents of Vineland become victims of Rex84 (an armed exercise to test the US military's ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest or national emergency.) Pynchon describes it as “big and invisible...silent, undocumented, forever deniable.”
The Nature of Resistance
Reagan is resisted by a coalition of forces, including dopers, bikers, students, unionists, “die hard industry lefties” in Hollywood, the Old Left, Wobblies, the New Left and Anarchists.
Guerillas turn skywriting and billboards that proclaim “Drug Free America” into “Drugs Free America”. Only, within a few years, they’re either dead or drinking Bud Light.
While I suspect that Pynchon is more sympathetic to Anarchism than I am, Frenesi comes from a family tradition that is more labour-oriented than focussed on the Identity Politics of the New Left and the Anarchist movement. Her parents have experienced HUAC inquiries, Hollywood black lists and strike-breaking. Their politics is more concerned with the plight of the working class under American capitalism than it is with more social and cultural issues. For the sake of convenience, I’ll call the former Hard Left Politics and the latter Soft Left Politics.
While the Soft Left continued its struggle into the 80’s, its effectiveness was undermined by Reagan's use of authoritarian force and the distribution of psychedelic drugs by the law enforcement agencies. Worse still, the Soft Left was placated, sedated and negated by the new drug of complacency and conformity, Television (the Tube). Pynchon seems to lament that the Soft Left became more prominent than the Hard Left. Despite his consistent identification with the counter-culture, he seems to regard its social and cultural concerns as introspective, self-obsessed and narcissistic.
To the extent that the New Left focuses on the status of the individual, it’s political program is individualistic in nature. In contrast, the Old Left focuses on the role of workers under Capitalism, and its political program is collectivist.
Tubular Blues
The Broken Collectivity
Either way, Reagan severely damaged the collective of resistance, so that Pynchon refers to it as “the broken collectivity”.
Blue-eyed Frenesi's reaction was to turn blue. She suffered postnatal depression after the birth of her daughter, Prairie, who joins the quest for her mother with her father, Zoyd Wheeler, and various federal agents (not just Brock Vond) who are obsessed with her. In a way, the quest to find Frenesi after she disappears ends up being a quest for the restoration of family, and arguably family order.
This is Pynchon at his most sentimental or empathetic (what he calls a "little wave of tenderness"). However, it also suggests an additional degree of scepticism about Anarchism. This is what he has to say about Brock Vond:
“Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family…They needed some reconditioning.”
Perhaps, the State doesn’t need to be abolished. It too might just need some reconditioning. Whether this reads too much into Pynchon’s work, I still think it can be questioned whether he equates the counterculture with Anarchism. It's arguable that an alternative culture of any significance requires a social democracy (a democratic family) within which to thrive. An anarchist society would be too full of unregulated and counterproductive individualism and conflict.
The Words of the Next Generation
Rightly or wrongly, Prairie's boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, blames the Tube for what went wrong:
"Whole problem ‘th you folks’ generation, nothin’ personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it - but you didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars - it was way too cheap…"
February 26, 2017 -
I don’t usually finish a book and start a review in the same breath. But I also don’t usually allow myself to read more than one of an author’s works within a calendar year (many books, little time, etc. -- though of course Stephen King would be this year’s other exception because the Tower, all things yield to it): T. Ruggs, you magnificant bastard, I hope you know how many personal rules I’m violating because you’re the first time since auspiciously picking up my first collection of Bukowski poems that I’ve been able to add a This Writer Changed My Life For Always notch to my literary bedpost. Reading “Vineland” confirmed what “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me suspecting: I bloody love Thomas Pynchon. Rilly.
Finishing “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me with an almost obscene urge to help myself to another serving of Pynchon, which is an urge I’ve been fighting for months now. I finally caved, intending to take on “V” but settling for “Vineland” because part of the joy of Pynchon is the inherent madness, and I just can’t handle another meaty tome yet (the latter weighs in at a few pages shy of 400; the former.... uh, does most assuredly not). And because I haven’t talked about GR enough, I am still a little battered from that experience (my opinion on bananas might be forever changed, too). I needed something a little less daunting first. Enter: “Vineland.”
This book was so good. Now being able to pinpoint a Pynchonian pattern – a few: musical outbursts, sleuthing plots, oddball character names, stunning tangents that really aren’t that tangential after all, a natural vocabulary only found in the most ruthless of Scrabble opponents – helped me identify what I adore most about Pynchon’s prose. It’s his ability to concoct some of the most overtly zany scenes in literature, to confront the reader with these in-your-face storms of hilarity for the sake of maximizing the subtle tragedies he gently lets the story consider, leaving the reader to marinate in sadness. It’s an effect that would be any mixture of sloppy, condescending, formulaic or tedious if attempted by anyone else but Pynchon makes it work. The real success is that his characters who need be sympathetic are so when someone realizes that her best days are behind her or comes to the dawning realization that he’s being used by an entire government or has an ugly epiphany about the mother she never knew, it is the most heartbreaking scene in the world.
As for the effort involved in decoding the obscure references that are sprinkled throughout Pynchon’s books as liberally as the Bacon Bits on any salad worth eating, I was deeply grateful that T. Ruggs's novel begins the same year as I did, which meant I caught waywayWAAAAY more cultural allusions this time. The narrative flows better when I’m not running to a secondary source every three lines and I appreciated the opportunity to enjoy this book less haltingly, which isn't to say that I didn't need to have a few reference materials handy. There were enough hazy hippie memories to keep me on my toes, though I caught a number of those as often as I had a flutter of joyful recognition every time The Doors or Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or some other People's Republic of Rock and Roll favorite got a shout-out.
I feel a reread of "The Crying of Lot 49" and maybe "Inherent Vice" in my future. Color me fucking amped. -
Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits...
A ginormous set of characters stomping around Northern California and beyond, doing weird shit as the national culture shifts its goalposts around them. Zoyd leaps through windows, more a symbolic penance than any true means of escape. Hector is so addicted to television that it's impossible to know what he knows to be true and what's an invention of his deluded mind. Frenesi is a snitch on the federal payroll at a time when computers are leading the heartless beauracratic charge to find ways to cut the budget. And Brock Vond is the unseen but mighty arm of a government keen on flexing its muscles. These and other lunatic fringe types mix and mingle as everybody moves from one side of the law to the other, some with ease and some with painful consequence.
...Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. (83)
Pynchon confronts the lines between fantasy and reality in this TV-soaked and cinema-saturated trek through the recent past. Borrowing cues from 70s cop dramas, Kung Fu, and c., camp meets compassion as Pynchon makes worlds collide in a kaleidoscopic fireworks display.
3.5 stars. Since I doubt anyone comes to Vineland without some other Pynchon already, I'll do the old compare and contrast here: I thought it was similar to but a lot denser than Inherent Vice, and I enjoyed rolling things around symbollically like some kind of artsy-fartsy wine tasting where Thunderbird and Boone's Farm are considered top-shelf. It's fun and often funny but Pynchon still makes you work for it. At least here we follow a straightforward plot, unlike Gravity's Rainbow or V. Because of this the book is much less puzzling and much less of an academic's wet dream - so it lives in the shadow of Pynchon's greater hits, but it's also that much more accessible. -
2024 Reread:
Once Pynchon had burnt the liquid oxygen propellant out of his system by way of a 770-page prose poem about "Money, Shit and the Word", all he was left to reckon with was the death rattle of a generation he held to be his peers, "countless lies about American freedom", and the choice of whether or not to let his readers continue to labour under the delusion that they were living in a "prefascist twilight".
Spoiler alert: they were not.
What was embedded in the perforated moiré of the Zone is made explicit under the Redwood trees of Vineland California, the highwater mark of Pynchon's skill as a novelist of character, time, and place. A novel so perfectly of and about the post-hippie dissolution and disillusion; a time when lighters that were once used to ignite cotton wicks plugged into wine bottles are now only serviceable in the lighting of one's cigarette outside their mobile home. No need to despair at what you've become though, there's still a community of counterculture failures to commiserate with. Join us down at the Friday night bonfire behind the Cucumber Lounge, where "iron speakers up on stripped fir poles crash alive with the national anthem." God, can you think of anything more American than that?
This novel - bowed under the weight of nearly two decades' worth of expectation - showcases Pynchon achieving a rare balance between the inconsequential, apolitical humanism of V, and the abstract, chemical alienation GRAVITY'S RAINBOW elicited in its less receptive readers (that is to say, those for whom it's abstractions failed to strike a connective chord). A precise balance of historical pain and recognition of responsibility, bound together with (it annoys me how trite this sounds) a deeply resonant familial love. It can be difficult to render any sense of clarity or finality on first past, as it's awash with his trademarked analepses and that trans-generational focalisation you'll recognise from the Big Red Rocket. One minute you're in a hotboxed panel van, and the next you're in a Guerilla film collective's cutting room a decade prior. You're not anchored to linear momentum the way conventional authors have conditioned you to be. Time and place notwithstanding, you're all fed the same narrative, and subject to the same asphyxiating judicial constrictions. They'll find a way to make that pill a little less bitter though; placate you with a few Mindless Pleasures.
"All the light they thought saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-coloured shadows."
God, I love this book. More to be said in the weeks to come. Keep that Tube glowin'.
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Vineland is a concise response to everyone who has criticised Pynchon for weak characterisation. Not without merit, mind you. In previous, more conceptually heavy works - Gravity's Rainbow being a brilliant but notorious offender - individual personae are sidelined, providing him with the latitude to flex his conceptual and thematic muscles. If you're a fan of the man's work, you know this is where he fires on all cylinders, operating as arguably the strongest prose stylist currently living. But the critical community have consistently remarked that his characters tend to skew cartoonish and highly stylised, stretching the boundaries of real, humanistic behaviour. Whether you subscribe to this opinion is another discussion altogether.
Enter Vineland, the second of TRP's ‘California Trilogy’, and often mischaracterised as "Pynchon Lite" (a flippant turn of phrase that will never cease to drive me bananas, pun intended). Those who gave it this unfortunate connotation in the first place are likely just the insufferable hoard of LitBros who resented their author being widely approachable for once, insecure that their status as "serious readers" might be threatened by a broader audience enjoying his work.
Here, TRP illustrates a generation in decline – the Countercultural movement of the late 60’s – as it passes from revolutionary social force into a quiet understated retirement. Vineland, a rural California community surrounded by towering redwood obelisks, is the hospice centre where these former revolutionaries come to accept the hand they’ve been dealt under Nixonian repression and swallow the bitter pill of incumbent Reaganomics. While a traditional protagonist is expectedly absent from the novel, what we’re presented with is a mosaic of lifelike characters, each positioned somewhere along the sliding scale of counterculture. Pynchon dilates in and out of each of their lives as they pass near, into, and through one another, creating a landscape portrait of the Hippie Generation. Yet in spite of this wide-angle view of society, no expense is spared when it comes to weaving texture into the personal histories of these people. I would argue that this is his most character focussed novel of the entire catalogue, particularly when it comes to establishing their individual motivations and ideological drives; an unexpected but delightful surprise.
The dust-jacket, one-liner reviews tend to forefront the “hilarity” and “humour” of this novel, a point of focus I simply do not understand. While the classic Pynchonian hijinks are absolutely present – it wouldn’t be one of his novels without them – this is the first of his works that I can comfortably characterise as a tragedy. He is, through and through, a countercultural icon, always siding with the Preterite over the Elect, preoccupied with the innumerate ways control systems find to subjugate them. While countercultural movements still exist today, they’re a fractured, crystalline set of tiny subcultures that share as little with one another as they do with the dominant social forces that repress them. Pynchon was forced to watch in real-time, as the outgroup he subscribed to was shattered in this way, and left to seek refuge in pocketed communities among the redwoods and low-rent beach flats. If reading Vineland you find yourself criticising it for ending on an open-ended note without resolution, I invite you to consider the possibility that this is exactly what he felt when writing it.
To boil it down to a soundbite, one-line thesis of my own (no easy task when it comes to Pynchon), Vineland is an examination of the price we pay for compromising our values for monetary reward, and the influences that drive us to make such fateful decisions in the first place. Despite other works of his careening themselves nose-down into literal oblivion (Now everybody!), I view this as the most melancholy of them all. An under-appreciated entry in the author's catalogue. -
è come provare, leggendo, l’effetto di una sbornia di tetris (nella vita 1 fui nel tunnel, so di cosa parlo). ci sono un mucchio di forme colorate che piovono dall’alto, e istintivamente cerchi di far quadrare tutto: nuovi personaggi, riferimenti, sottoplot, collegamenti.
solo che a differenza del giochetto inventato dai russi, mano a mano che procedi, a galvanizzarti non è il meccanismo di gratificazione-da-illusione-di-controllo che gli psicologi chiamano effetto zeigarnik (e chi fosse il signor zeigarnik mi guardo bene dal chiederlo) bensì il suo opposto. cioè la resa incondizionata all’invenzione e alla pirotecnica dell’autore, e al tipo di critica che le alimenta.
conta godersi lo spettacolo, insomma, che pynchon infarcisce di simboli da pop culture sporcati di riflessioni da esegeta del declino americano, o viceversa. ci si lascia travolgere dal beato effetto di spaesamento lisergico, sedurre dalla prosa, coinvolgere dal riconoscimento di quel che di vero c’è dietro ogni sparata sugli ideali infrantisi nel decennio reaganiano.
non so se anche pynchon alla lunga provochi un ispessimento della corteccia nei lobi frontali, e un ampliamento delle facoltà cognitive e del pensiero razionale. il tetris sembrerebbe provato di sì. però so di sicuro che, come taglia corto quel fallimentare big lebowski che è lo zoyd wheeler di questo romanzo, «finché è durata, ci siamo divertiti un mondo». -
Video-review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D5iB...
Unjustly considered a happy-go-lucky slapstick comedy of a novel, Vineland is in fact quite dark and bitter in its potrait of what went wrong with the 60s. There's humor, sure, but lots of capital E Evil too. A novel of ideas more than character, more I think than any other Pynchon's, it might work well as a starting point for those looking to pop their Pynchon cherry, although I still believe Inherent Vice works better. -
Pynchonian zaniness + fibrous nutrition at the sentence level + fun to read + hermeneutical-political + leaving plenty of lacunae in immediate comprehension to commit intellectual effervescence, not to mention I’m of an age to not to have to look up most of the cultural references.
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I had a preconceived notion of what just how good Vineland would be before I read it. My opinions about the book have been influenced by numerous accounts of how weak it was. After having read everything that preceded Pynchon's fourth novel, it's still difficult for me to wholeheartedly disagree, even though I thoroughly enjoyed some parts of it. It made me laugh...but even though I wasn't an avid fan when it was published in 1990, I still couldn't help wonder why this was the book that Pynchon decided to put out there seventeen years after Gravity's Rainbow. The basic sentiment stands; it's inevitable that anything that he had published after Gravity's Rainbow would pale in comparison. That novel is wonderful, and despite my inability to explain exactly why it is, I have a hard time sincerely saying that his subsequent effort really matched up at all. So there it is, I've said it. I've been influenced by descriptions of Vineland, as well as my preconceived expectation for utter disappointment, and now I have to talk about it. However, Salman Rushdie seemed to have enjoyed it. His NYT review is glowing with beatnick-pastiche zeal.
Vineland basically begins with Zoyd Wheeler, a burnt-out "generic long-hair" who is preparing to do his annual publicity stunt (jumping through the window of a bar) in order to cash in on his disability check issued by the government. His old arch-nemesis Hector Zuniga shows up looking for his old lady, Frenesi Gates, and is wondering; will Zoyd help the FBI and the DEA please find out where she is? His daughter Prairie is interested, as much as a young daughter could be in her counterculture/hippie/anarchist/ filmmaker mother. The narrative unfolds through old friends explaining Frenesi's tumultuous political existence to her estranged daughter.
It's in this context that Pynchon covers a lot of ground. What follows is basically a critique of both the Nixon and Reagan years. It's mostly vitriol too, as Pynchon has obviously been harboring in many of these views since finishing Gravity's Rainbow. As usual, it isn't unbalanced because he makes a point of addressing the fact that the hippie movement had failed due to the way that this particular historical revolution had been sublimated by popular culture, television, drugs, rock and roll music, etc. This is all thanks to the American government, and a point that Pynchon wants to stress throughout the book.
How is it though? I don't know. Maybe if I had read it when it just came out in 1990? Hunter S. Thomspon's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas covers the same ground, as well as countless other authors. Whether or not I actually have read enough about the 60's, I simply feel like I know too much about this point in history, and that my knowledge of which has been negatively influenced by romantic cliches. Most of Vineland's pomo zaniness feels stilted, due to this particular style being heavily exploited throughout the early nineties. Pynchon's tone and style seem weak throughout, making Vineland sound, at times, like someone ghostwriting for him. It just lacks the acerbic wit and humor that all of his previous novels embody. I don't think I need to remind too many people that the Crying of Lot 49 covered the same historical period in time with a little more...character.
Is it great Pynchon, no. Is it bad Pynchon, no. It's just Pynchon, and personally that is a statment that I would like to avoid using. -
I've now read all of Pynchon's novels. I have
Slow Learner: Early Stories heading my way from the library, and then there's nothing else left but to re-read them all again. Which I will probably do, over and over, for the rest of my life.
I'll admit that Vineland took me a minute to get into, but once I did, I really enjoyed the world spun up in its pages. It's obviously "minor" Pynchon, or "Pynchon-lite" as coined by Michiko Kakutani in her review of
Bleeding Edge, but in some ways, that is a wonderful thing. The fact that Pynchon's range goes from erudite metaphors of entropy and the human death/sex drive to familial dramas ala TV soap operas is remarkable.
I don't really have a lot to add here other than to say that I do feel a pit of sadness not having another Pynchon work to look forward to—sure, I still have Slow Learner to churn through soon, but that doesn't really count. I hope the guy, turning 83 this year, has something cooking for us, ready to present soon. I need it. The country needs it. -
While not for me his strongest book, Vineland shows very Pychonian characters trying to work out their relationships to each other. There is even a big Hollywood style ending (probably a pastiche/parody) to the story. I found that the backdrop was less the chaos and anarchy that I appreciated in Gravity's Rainbow, Mason&Dixon and Against the Day and so I appreciated this one less than those. I would put it low in the Pychon canon but still suggest that it is worth reading for his insights into California hippyism which are often hilarious and sometimes poignant.
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I really hate the “Pynchon-lite” classification. Sure, the common gripe people have with this thing is that it’s not the mind-blowing encyclopedic trip we love from the guy, but he’s doing a different thing here.
Pynchon’s take on popular culture, family, and generational dynamics is just as brilliant as anything he’s ever done, and let’s face it, anything directly following GR (especially after such a long hiatus) was doomed in terms of critical reception. Not just for completists, this is one of Tommy’s best. -
Non ho dato 5 stelle perché sebbene sia un ottimo romanzo non è al pari di vette assolute come V e l'arcobaleno della gravità... Ma ripeto pure un Pynchon minore è maggiore di gran parte della letteratura odierna
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Καθώς διάβαζα άλλο ένα απίθανο βιβλίο του Pynchon αυτό που είχα συνέχεια στο μυαλό μου ήταν τι εντύπωση θα μου έκανε αν το διάβαζα σε real time, το 1990, ως το βιβλίο που κυκλοφόρησε ο συγγραφέας μετά από 17 χρόνια σιωπής που ακολούθησαν το αξεπέραστο Ουράνιο Τόξο. Αυτό βέβαια δεν είναι κάτι άλλο από απλή λογοτεχνική άσκηση, γιατί το Vineland αν κ μάλλον είναι το βιβλίο του που με συγκίνησε περισσότερο (είμαι στα μισά της βιβλιογραφίας του βέβαια), ταυτόχρονα είναι ξεκάθαρο ότι δεν φθάνει τα ύψη όσων είχαν προηγηθεί κ αυτών που θα ακολουθούσαν (π.χ. mason & dixon, δεν έχω διαβάσει το Ενάντια στη Μέρα αν κ έχω προσπαθήσει). Ίσως να είχα απογοητευτεί, ποιος ξέρει. Το σίγουρο είναι πως το 2017 μοιάζει σαν ένα μικρό αριστούργημα.
Το Vineland, αν κ το χαρακτηρίζει το απίθανο χιούμορ του συγγραφέα του, είναι ένα σκοτεινό βιβλίο που σχολιάζει την κατέρρευση των χίπικων ονείρων των 60s (για τους Αμερικανούς καυτό θέμα, αντίστοιχο με τα όσα σημαίνει το τέλος του σοσιαλιστικού ονείρου για την ευρωπαϊκή λογοτεχνία). Ο Pynchon με ασταμάτητα μπρος πίσω στο χρόνο (το σήμερα του βιβλίου είναι το 1984 -Ρίγκαν δηλαδή κτλ.) αφηγείται μια παρανοϊκή ιστορία των 60s που περιλαμβάνει μια γυναίκα-νίντζα, πολλά ναρκωτικά, ανθρώπινες σχέσεις κάθε είδους, μια υπόνοια από Γκοντζίλα, ανάσταση νεκρών, επιτυχημένες κ αποτυχημένες εξεγέρσεις, χωρίς ο αναγνώστης να χάνει το ενδιαφέρον του ούτε λεπτό. Σε δεύτερο επίπεδο, υπάρχει η οικογένεια κ εκεί ακριβώς βρίσκονται οι καλύτερες σελίδες του βιβλίου. Οι πρωταγωνιστές του βιβλίου αλλάζουν κι εκεί που στην αρχή πιστεύεις πως θα διαβάσεις κάτι αντίστοιχο με το Inherent Vice κ πως όλα θα κινηθούν γύρω απ'τον Zoyd κ την κόρη του καθώς θα προσπαθήσουν να ξεφύγουν απ'τα δόντια του FBI, το βιβλίο απλώνεται κ εστιάζει σε ένα σκασμό απίθανους χαρακτήρες με τον Ιάπωνα ασφαλιστή Takeshi να είναι μάλλον ο αγαπημένος μου. Ίσως βέβαια ο Pynchon να το παρακάνει με τις εναλλαγές αφού κάπου στα μισά το Vineland μοιάζει ένα πολύ μπερδεμένο κουβάρι αλλά το καταπληκτικό φιναλε δικαιολογεί μάλλον τα πάντα.
Δεν θα πω τίποτα παραπάνω, απίθανο βιβλίο, ανώτερο του IV
Υ.Γ. Ας προσποιηθούμε όλοι μαζί πως το βιβλίο δεν έχει μεταφραστεί στα ελληνικά, όχι γιατί ο μεταμοντέρνος τρόπος γραφής του, δύσκολα διασώζεται στην μετάφραση (ο Κυριαζής έχει αποδείξει άλλωστε το αντίθετο) αλλά γιατί η ελληνική μετάφραση του Βαχλιώτη κάνει αυτή του Μάτεσι στο Handmaid's Tale να φαντάζει ως το καλύτερο πράγμα που έχει συμβεί στην ιστορία της μεταφρασμένης πεζογραφίας της χώρας. Τονίζω ότι δεν υπάρχει δείγμα ιδιοτροπίας εδώ, πρόκειται για έγκλημα. Ότι υπάρχει άνθρωπος που το διάβασε στα ελληνικά κ του άρεσε είτε αποδεικνύει το μεγαλείο του Pynchon είτε ότι το όνομα του "δύσκολου" που κουβαλάει ήταν αρκετή δικαιολογία για να προσπεραστούν τα όσα ακατανόητα συμβαίνουν. Ντρέπομαι να το πουλήσω μη τυχόν κ το αγοράσει κάποιος. -
Yes, perhaps my favourite book of all time, cos like Charles Dickens's Hard Times, it embodies an entire structure of feeling (industrial England/post-Fordist-post-1968 America respectively) and makes you laugh and feel while also making you doubt and think. Unlike Hard Times (which I nevertheless love to bits), it doesn't lecture at you re: precisely what to attitudes to adopt about any of that (OK, other than that whole Nixon-Reagan axis of meanness angle). Rather it bestrews all kinds of juicy little historical nuggets along your readerly path, and if it has any univocal message about any of that, it is simply (not at all merely) in the spirit of, as world-weary DL sez, "Look it up, check it out."
Wrote about the book
here and
there... -
In, "Against the Day", Pynchon describes "prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America's wardens could not tolerate," and Vineland is one of these visions. In luscious, lyrical beauty, this novel lays out Pynchon's idealistic portrait of what America might have been, and then explores how this vision was subverted, the weaknesses in this vision that always existed, to be exploited by governments and corporations, denied and destroyed. To me, Vineland is both the most hopeful novel and the darkest novel I have read from Pynchon so far.
Vineland does not so much move forwards so much as it moves outwards, spreading, gathering depth. It is a treasure trove of stories; each character has their own narrative laid out in breathtaking detail, full of ninjas, giant lizards, heartbreak and triumph, the usual. Here, all of Pynchon's trademarks are heightened; the quest for a mysterious figure, the drugs and hallucinations, the meticulous histories of every major and minor character, the haunting, lyrical writing, the slapstick comedy, and the bizarre songs. Vineland is a short novel compared to Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day, but it's no less a piece of enthusiastic maximalism.
What I love about Pynchon's writing is the way he moves from the comedic to the lyrical to the strange in a single sentence. For example, "It was like being on Wheel of Fortune, only here there were no genial vibes from any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at the corner of his vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip over one by one letters of a message he knew he didn't want to read anyway." Pynchon can expand his world, develop his characters, and make you laugh, in just a few clauses.
Vineland is to me a book about longing, longing for a Dream that may have died years ago, a Dream hounded on all sides by agents of evil, but persisting nonetheless, realized in fleeting moments, a Dream of freedom and love and prosperity. Pynchon's writing, when addressing this idea of a community of love without rules or governors, becomes indescribable, dripping with aching desire, yet acknowledging that perhaps such a vision was never possible in the first place.
And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows
Vineland is a bleak novel at times, presenting with almost ruthless cyncism the schemes of the agents who exploited the youth rebellion for their own aims.
Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family
But Pynchon is careful to keep this cynicism constrained to the thoughts of the villains. His heroes are those who never stop striving toward the vision of freedom, at all costs. This mixture of moving forwards as well as indulging in aching nostalgia provides the heart-breaking emotional power residing at the heart of this novel.
The storm lashed the night, dead trees on slow log trucks reared up in the high-beams shaggy and glistening, the highway was interrupted by flooding creeks and minor slides that often obliged the bus to creep around inches from the edge of Totality. Aislemates struck up conversations, joints appeared and were lit, guitars came down from overhead racks and harmonicas out of fringe bags, and soon there was a concert that went on all night, a retrospective of the times they'd come through more or less as a generation, the singing of rock and roll, folk, Motown, fifties oldies, and at last, for about an hour just before the watery green sunrise, one guitar and one harmonica, playing the blues.
Vineland is an incredible novel. It moves from comedy to bitterness to hopefulness, and it is all presented in glowing, marvelous prose. Yet here, his usual tricks: paranoia, conspiracies, quests, myriad subplots, are presented with a kind of transparency missing in the rest of his work. This is a book meant to be read and enjoyed. I absolutely loved this one. -
While Vineland seems weak among all the pynchons, it's still pynchon all the way. For once I could read Pynchon casually, i.e, without having to check PynchonWiki or dictionary. Characters are caricature-y, cartoon-y and the whole thing is very sitcom like, but with high budget, liberty and no restrictions from telecaster.
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This novel is great, and I’m glad that I decided to read it again. Although often described as ‘Pynchon-lite’, I think this novel is more in the tradition of Pynchon’s great works than it's often credited as being, and I think it’s been under-appreciated.
The plot of Vineland is nominally about the search for Frenesi Gates. The themes of Vineland are nominally connected to the end of the hippie movement, and the birth of Reaganite politics. But the book is also about so much more. Like most Pynchon novels, Vineland is very much concerned with the corrupting influence of power and the death of idealism. It may not be as viscerally shocking as Gravity’s Rainbow, nor is it as dark, but Vineland is every bit as cynical. Whereas Gravity’s Rainbow focused on the dehumanising effects of war, and the inexorable path through war towards degeneracy, Vineland is more concerned with ideological death, and with the corrupting influence of greed. Its main focus is on how the hippie movement died, and how its exponents transformed into enablers of the very forces they were ostensibly fighting against.
"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined, "nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap...."
Vineland is also about the Thanatoids, a subculture who have become so dependent on television, that they are unable to meaningfully function without its constant input. I think this concept has been developed further in our society since this book was published, as we have found more and more efficient ways to pump constant feeds of information into our brains. This was a process that was once rooted to a finite number of physical locations, where televisions were wired up and plugged in. Thankfully, these days, we've found a way to make the process portable!
What this novel very definitely is not, is a comedy. Sure, there’s a lot of wacky scenes, as there always are in Pynchon, but I think to focus on them is to miss what’s actually going on. Pynchon is a master of marrying the wacky with the terrifying. This novel is full of hijinks, but it is also a completely cynical reflection on a human inability to make cultural progress. It’s not really about slipping over on banana peels - it’s about how hopes and dreams find themselves on a collision course with death. Vineland is partly about the process of ageing, but it’s also about becoming a person which our younger self would hate, and letting that happen for reasons that our young self would not understand, and which even our older self may secretly resent. A large part of this novel is about why people give up on their dreams, and how they rationalise their decision as something which is good and right and inevitable.
This book is great. I love it. At this moment, it’s up with Gravity’s Rainbow as one of my favourite Pynchon novels. I’ve read most of his books, but this is only the second novel of his that I’ve re-read. I don’t think I really appreciated it the first time. -
Re-read. Goddamn this is a glorious book. For all the wackiness, I'd say this is the first time Pynchon lays bare his true humanism without obfuscating it behind oblique language. It's just a big shaggy dog of a story and I can't say enough good things about it. Anyone that compares it to V., GR, M&D, or AtD is an idiot that knocks it for not going epic-scale. Take it for what it is: a sweet little book about family, and the shifting definitions that word has come to encompass.
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«Watch the paranoia, please!»
This was my third go at trying to gradually voyage through Pynchon's oeuvre, having read Lot 49 and Inherent Vice before. Based on the immediate impression, Vineland is probably my least favorite of the three, but that's not to say there aren't countless diamonds hidden along the pages of this book. The story is set in Northern California in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan era, and is largely an elegy for the late 60s countercultural movement. We follow numerous characters that were involved in various ways with the events of that time, and we see how they are affected by the consequences and aftermath of that era, and we get numerous flashbacks to the turbulent events of their younger days.
There's a lot of trademark Pynchonian quirky humor and absurdity in here. At the same time, I also found it to harbor a rather pessimistic outlook on the failures of the 60s countercultural movement and a dark foreboding as to the authoritarian direction America was heading from Nixon through Reagan.
"[. . .] the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power."
But alongside this cynicism there's simultaneously an optimism that shines through, a hope that some of the pro-social undercurrents of the countercultural movement have survived on.
The book is shorter than most of Pynchon's work, but it's still deceptively dense, and his trademark fragmented style of seamlessly changing perspective mid-chapter is present. There's not really a single leading character, and we instead change between numerous people whose own backstories and sub-plots are expounded.
In my eyes, I do feel that Pynchon tackles many of the same themes of this book in a slightly more engaging way in Inherent Vice. But this is still a worthwhile read. -
2023: Rereads bring out a lot of magic missed the first journey through.
2019:
And everyone lived happily ever after....
Not my favorite Pynchon, but was much better than what I was expecting. There was a lot of funny shit in this one. One of my favorite funnies, Pee-Wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story. -
I've been struggling with myself since finishing my recent re-read of this to come up with a review. Writing and mentally deleting. Every new version feeling more illiterate and clumsy. Let's just say that this raised itself to one of my favorite Pynchon's on heart alone. Anyone that calls this lesser Pynchon is missing the point. It is written exactly like this for a reason. In this case I believe form follows function. When in grad school for anthropology I had two advisors. One was a post-structuralist and the other a cognitive scientist. One said "there is no person." The other would laugh and be completely warm and present. Theory-wise they were both right. What I wanted to yell was, "It's both dammit!" Pynchon in GR went from a deterministic systems approach to reverse in VL to an inside out "why do they do this?" psychological approach. Both are present and true. What LEVEL are we looking at?! [To point to Sean Carroll's approach.] I think Pynchon would go on to perfect some melding of these two sides in Mason and Dixon and then even more perfectly with the Traverses (who are firmly in the family lineage in VL) in Against the Day. Why did the children of the 60s turn in the 80s? Why and how did ideals sell out and buy in to consumerism in the 80s? Pynchon is always looking for turning points in history. Where things could have gone differently. Where could we have turned right instead of wrong? Could we have become better people? Could we have beat the system that surrounds us? Why do we choose not to? To throw in with authoritarianism? How does irrational desire that we can't even understand beat us against our own best wishes? Is there a way out against us all becoming mere cogs and commodities enmeshed in The System? In Vineland, Pynchon begins to suss out an answer which will be examined further in Against the Day. It is social relationships it seems that is our only escape. The bonds that join us if believed in and held firm that might be the only answer to the white death of Capitalism.
Lesser Pynchon?
F*ck you. -
Reread 24.09.2018- 07.10.2018
I'm learning that Pynchon is only better the second time around. Against the Day next?
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So that's it for my third Pynchon. Coming down from a sort of high after reading
Mason & Dixon about a month ago, I had pretty high expectiations going into this one.
Well, what's it all about? As usual Pynchon has a lot of sub-plots going on, characters disappearing and then coming back into the story again almost at random, and characters coming into the book but you never actually see them ever again. But in its essence it's about freedom, political repression, the tremendous failure that is the war on drugs and, as Salman Rushdie said, a look at what "America has been doing to its children, all these many years," and finally a sort of TV-is-bad-for-you-mmmkay-plot that runs throughout the book. For some reason I thought of this after finishing it...
(
http://xkcd.com/1013/)
The whole thing is funny, oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny, and as the book progresses it gets more and more engaging; probably because at first you don't really understand what is going on, but it gets a little easier after a while. Pynchon has a knack for writing extremely beautiful paragraphs. I don't think I've ever read anyone who writes in a similar vein; it's really remarkable at times. Unfortunately I didn't take notes reading this so I don't have any quotes ready, but just take my word for it. Read it and see. It's not as brilliant as Mason & Dixon but hardly a failure of a book either. Very much Pynchon, and well worth reading!
