Wonderful as always from Tommy boy.

Questa recensione sarà di parte, così come ogni parola che scrivo riguardo a Thomas Pynchon. Semplicemente perché se amo leggere lo devo ad autori come lui, capaci di raccontare mondi, generazioni, culture, cambiamenti, mode, paure e chi più ne ha più ne metta, in maniera visionaria, illuminante e poliedrica, sempre.
Fatta questa necessaria premessa posso parlare di Vineland in particolare.
Vineland è il nome di una piccola città della California del nord, dove hanno luogo gran parte degli eventi descritti. La città è immaginaria, ma gli elementi romanzati che la caratterizzano no: tempo uggioso, circolazione di marijuana a non finire, comunità hippie, sbandati e ligi poliziotti… E’ il 1984, l’apice della supremazia di destra di Ronald Reagan, e i tentacoli dello stato stanno raggiungendo praticamente qualsiasi forma di ribellione esistente su suolo americano. In questo contesto troviamo Zoyd Wheeler, ex hippie che sopravvive grazie al sussidio federale in quanto malato di mente. Vive con sua figlia Prairie, che lo ama e lo disprezza allo stesso tempo, semplicemente perché cresciuta senza madre, con cui vorrebbe disperatamente ricongiungersi. La loro esistenza viene sconvolta nuovamente da Brock Vond, uomo del governo, che negli anni ’60 ha sedotto la moglie di Zoyd, Frenesi, e l'ha trasformata da hippie in informatrice dell'Fbi. Frenesi, però, è scomparsa e Brock vuole usare la figlia per ritrovarla.
Da qui si dipanano tante altre storie, con protagonisti una folla di sbandati simili a Zoyd: bande di motociclisti kamikaze, cultori della morte come i Thanatoidi (che altro non sono che zombie, ridotti a larve umane dalla televisione), gruppi di ninjette dall’improbabile nome di Attente Kunoichi, boss mafiosi, compagnie assicurative, mostri in stile godzilla, coltivatori di marijuana, membri della yakuza… Il solito contorto, appassionante e variegato intreccio pynchoniano, che poco serve a svelare la portata di un romanzo come questo.
In Vineland prende forma uno degli argomenti cari a Thomas Pynchon: quel dualismo contraddittorio insito nell'anima stessa della nazione statunitense, quello tra la libertà (principio fondante e che dà forma il Grande Sogno Americano) e il controllo (necessario al mantenimento del potere e della egemonia culturale).
Anche qui ritroviamo tra le pagine il fallimento di una società, che può essere quella americana, ma anche quella occidentale, il fallimento di una generazione, quella degli anni ’60, che credeva di poter rivoluzionare tutto, di poter cambiare il mondo e dare una svolta radicale alla piega degli eventi politici di quegli anni. Così non è stato, ovviamente. Perché l’immagine che ci restituisce Pynchon è quella di una società a pezzi, sedotta e strumentalizzata dalla TV, stordita dal consumismo di massa. Gli anni ’60 hanno fallito su tutta la linea, prima addormentati dalla cupezza di Nixon e poi inglobati dall’ipocrisia di Regan. I rivoluzionari sono cresciuti, hanno cominciato ad interessarsi al denaro e si sono trasformati in caricature di loro stessi. O, peggio, sono diventati più borghesi dei borghesi di allora. In Vineland la trasformazione degli ideali è evidente ed irreversibile: i rivoluzionari scappano dalla loro stessa rivoluzione, a cui più nessuno crede, diventando, nello spazio di un mattino, da anelito di libertà assoluta ad oscuro complotto di provocatori e infiltrati.
Questo, in particolare, è il ruolo di Frenesi, ex moglie di Zoyd. Frenesi è la voltagabbana per eccellenza della rivoluzione: sedotta dal procuratore Brock Vond, diventerà informatrice per la polizia portando su di sé la responsabilità morale della caduta della Repubblica Popolare del Rock and Roll, un piccolo stato marxista nato a Vineland. Sarà la figlia dei due, Prairie, diretta discendente della generazione dei figli dei fiori, a scoprire che il ricordo della stagione delle proteste studentesche e il sogno di un’America diversa, sono stati fagocitati, depotenziati da un ambiguo, paradossale e inarrestabile loop mediatico governato dalla TV.
A tratti si perde la mappa in quest'universo saturo di segnali, in questo racconto ricco di doppi sensi, ambivalenze e contrasti. Ma è questa la peculiarità e l’abilità di Pynchon: bisogna lasciarsi trascinare dalle sue parole, senza bussola in mano, senza dover per forza cercare di dare un ordine cronologico agli eventi, perché si viene sempre sbattuti avanti e indietro, trascinati in mondi agli antipodi, e lo si deve accettare, semplicemente: alla prosa di Pynchon ci si arrende, disarmati di fronte a tanto eclettismo cerebrale.

I read this when it first came out and I have to say I enjoyed it even more the second time through!

Will write more later, but I will say, a good read to contrast with our new world of internet espionage.

I hate to give up on a book. I told myself if you learned to love Faulkner, as challenging as he can be, you ought to be able to develop some appreciation for Pynchon. I have tried before but this time it was going to click.

Some things are just meant to be. I just do not understand the "greatness" of this author

I’m glad I paid no heed to those who put Vineland down as a minor entry in Pynchon’s remarkable oeuvre, because this novel right here has been – for the past few months I’ve been leisurely reading it to revel in the beautiful prose – a constant reminder as to why literature (and art, in general) is one of humankind’s greatest gifts.
Unabashedly sentimental and nostalgic – without ever relinquishing its darker undercurrents and pessimistic shades –, the novel is a towering masterwork of storytelling and atmospheric setting, revealing a Pynchon who is able to explore family dynamics and teenage sensibilities with the same vitality and acuity as displayed when investigating the waning of the effervescence and idealism that fueled the 1960s’ revolutionary pipe dream, the effects of Reagonomics and the Tube's octopean, soul-sucking reach. Betwixt this, there are myriads of hilarious pop culture references, sororities of deadly ninjettes, unspeakably wicked vampiric prosecutors, TV-addicted feds out of the loony bin, communities of zombies in need of Karmic Adjustment and many other wacky characters and situations that only Pynchon alone is able to think up.

Pynchon's most underrated, I think - a bighearted, funky read; a worthy 3rd "V" book.

ninjettes... karmic reckonings...mama mia style 3 way paternity...pretty good

What is it that makes rebellion a young person's game? Have you ever run into a young person railing against the world, demanding we bring down the corrupt systems that enslave us all, full of rage and righteous anger, while you, an adult, can only shake your head with a tight-lipped smile, maybe sharing a glance with other adults nearby as if to say, "young people, am I right?" Maybe you react that way out of melancholy, knowing that you, too, were once that young person, full of piss and vinegar, ready to take on the world, but now, now what? You think you know better now? That you've aged and matured past such trivialities, as if all of the world's evils can be softly explained away once you graduate from college?

The truth is we all soften, our sharp edges dull with time, we get distracted by bills and nice restaurants and children and streaming services. "I can barely keep my own life together!" we proclaim, as if the vast majority of our stressors aren't of our own creation, or maybe the creation of societal expectations that we appear to be powerless to overcome.

But what about those oppressive systems, those overwhelming evils that need to be held in check? Well that's just how the world is, isn't it? How it's always been. There's not much that can be done and there's definitely nothing I can do. I need to take care of myself and my own personal circle, you understand, and that takes all of my energy. Sure, I support all of the right causes, say all of the right things on social media (only echoes of an echo of my former anger), but life is hard enough, everything is so messed up, I have so much anxiety, don't I deserve to find whatever peace and happiness I can through whatever distractions I can find? Drugs, the Tube, the eternal scroll, whatever helps to keep that youthful optimism and anger bottled down where I can't feel it anymore.

This is Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, a timeless story never more relevant than today, even as it's specifically an exploration of the disillusionment of those young, rebellious free spirits of the 60s, eventually beaten down by fascistic Nixonian repression, the War on Drugs, a growing police state, the irresistible rise of the Tube, the beautiful people of Hollywood, and the transformation into "adulthood" with all of the children and bills and dead-end jobs that come with it. The story is told in true Pynchonian fashion, with tons of zany characters, lots of drugged-out sex and antics, and a primarily light-hearted tone that is intermittently interrupted with passages of searing gravity.

And of course, paranoia and conspiracy. There is some kind of giant machine, dark and faceless, that is seemingly breaking the spirts of these peace-loving hippies, maybe the police, maybe the government, but maybe something else larger in the shadows with a sinister masterplan, a force of nature that can't be stopped much less property identified, dulling our anger, sapping our spirits, making us soft and compliant. Are we being misled into an unnatural state of being? Or is it our natural state to be told what to do?

Vineland is often seen as Pynchon-lite (as if that is a thing that exists), but this is Pynchon at the top of his game, one of the best to ever do it, full of ideas and purpose, every sentence a marvel, every page a delight.

(Updated review)

When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?

What happened to the hippies? That's (probably?) the central question that the book is asking. The sad answer is that the hippie movement did not simply die at the start of the 1970s as popular history would have us believe, but died a thousand times over thanks to operations by the U.S government lasting well into the 1980s. Instead of the crackdowns waged against campus movements in the 1960s a new strategy emerges. Destroy from the inside.

By the end of the book most characters have in one way or another become informants for the FBI. Why did this happen? Who stood to gain? Some characters believe that it is all about the state consolidating power for itself. But the corruptive tentacles of power are not so easily classified. The book is most prescient in this passage where the former revolutionary Weed Atman (who is also dead?) begins to reflect on who is to blame for his murder.

(I) Used to think I was climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution- first Rex (other revolutionaries), above him your mother (the informants), then Brock Vond (the FBI), then- but that’s when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought I saw isn’t there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too.

There are systems at work beyond anyone's control or ability to understand. There was no malice in Weed's assassination. It was a necessity for the protraction of the powers-that-be. Is it the invisible hand at work?

I noted in a recent review that I couldn't appreciate a good run-on sentence anymore. That seems to have been a lie. Pynchon has some incredible run-on sentences.

Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . 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.

Highly recommended.

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 n  “V”n (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 n  “Gravity’s Rainbow”);n while it foreshadows the focus on the underground and anarchism that was so fundamental to n  “Against the Day”.n 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 n  “Mason & Dixon”:n

“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

Being consistently told that this was weaksauce and Pynchon’s worst and then experiencing how it actually turned out for myself is enough to get me to not trust lit nerds ever again. As always with Pynchon, an incredibly satisfying blast of high octane fun that’s inseparable from the class and cultural politics [and their relation to history] the man boldly concerns his art with. This one in particular is probably his most traditionally linear and works almost as a straightforward genre thriller more than any of his other books, while simultaneously maintaining that sense of rollicking free associative logic that so addictively defines Pynchon’s style for me. This is as stimulating and formally accomplished as his more “major” works and I do think history will critically vindicate it when we’re further removed from the ripple effects of the cultural period that Pynchon maximally details in this book.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that in the past decade or so 80s revivalism and nostalgia has been all over the place, and reading “Vineland” in context of the world in 2022 almost makes this book act as a post-hoc meta exercise in regards to America’s modern romanticization of that decade. Almost everything culture idolizes about the 80s is absent from this book, instead of a world of glamorous neon it’s a world of oppressive Reagan era policies and the continuing effects of Nixon's drug war and the past resonating from the hippie era and Vietnam. This book centers around the faded glory days and nostalgia of the children of the sixties, whose burgeoning revolution was buried under the following decades of state repression and cultural deadening. A lot of what I got out of this book is how the political apparatus both figuratively and literally beats the morale out of countercultural movements, resulting either in people like Zoyd who settle down into a sort of vague half-apathetic liberalism as a result of decades of systemic injustice, or people like Frenesi, who realize their individual pursuits against the system will not stop it and opt instead to work within the more direct bounds of the machine. But at the same time this may be Pynchon's most optimistic work yet, one about generations carrying the torch from one era to the next and how a revolutionary spirit can keep burning even when power structures close in like a fist.

This book's formal structure operates in perfect harmony with the narrative itself and acts as its backbone in a chaotic, back-and-forwards time jump narration style. The frenetic hopping from voice to voice and time to time picks up momentum like a tornado coming into existence before it climaxes in the center of the novel, the story of what happened to Weed Atman and the 24fps and the conspiracy surrounding the College of the Surf [which is some of the best and wildest stuff I've read from Pynchon yet]. This time-fracturing chaos narrative work fits neatly into the story's thematic bulk, because this is essentially a tale about a bunch of people trying to contextualize Time in the way they understand it and their relationships to past experiences and the failed futures promised by bygone memories. The amount of times this jumps from one character's story to another's, with almost no room to breathe, really adds a lot of entertainment value in trying to keep up and eventually inevitably getting swept away in the tide of voices that make up this huge cast. In many ways, but especially this one, this book feels like a younger, more digestible sibling of "Gravity's Rainbow" and may even act as a better primer to that book than "Lot 49".

A rock solid thematic core of the novel that I got out of this was the counterculture's existence in its relation to the opposition of fascism, and how fascism will either crush and demoralize these movements directly or, if that cannot be done, insidiously assimilate their ideas into the fabric of the system. The world "Vineland" portrays is one where popular culture and the state have rebranded revolutionary ideas into liberal gestures at change that help no one, instead opting to uphold a nebulously defined status quo. And this is possibly the most directly anti-statist novel I've read from TRP yet - cops are constantly portrayed as hypocritical thugs vying for their piece of the pie over dignity and using force to violate people's rights. Whereas most of Pynchon's other novels portray the capitalist apparatus as sort of an "invisible hand" governing the lives of everyday people, the hegemony is more directly interrogated in "Vineland", where we not only get a glimpse into the psyche of a ruthless federal prosecutor/police in Brock Vond, but also where the neoliberal government takes its most direct role in directly influencing the lives of every character in this book with a protagonistic role. It doesn't come as a surprise, then, that "Vineland" is the one Pynchon novel written closest to the actual correspondence of its time period, and the urgency of the violence begat by the Reagan administration can be felt vividly pulsing through every page of this work, something TRP hammers in with just how dedicated this one is to showing bourgeoise elites and their lapdogs for what they really are.

I have to mention the characters here because they in particular are what make me question what people are smoking when they insist this is Pynchon's weakest novel. The characters in "Vineland" are some of Pynchon's most thoroughly detailed and humanistic, ESPECIALLY the women who are undoubtedly Pynchon's best - prime examples being Frenesi the complex, multifaceted individual who is almost impossible to get a moral pin on, DL who is savvy and intellectual yet prone to human mistakes as she navigates a traditionally male profession, and finally Prairie, who is determined, headstrong and capable while also being completely believable as a teenager, and also embodies the novel's optimistic ultimate statement that the revolutionary torch can be passed down onto future generations with the amount of strength and desire for truth and independence she seeks as a core part of her character. Pynchon takes shots at hegemonic male sexuality and its relationship to dominance and violence, and how these things are used by men to control women and how women like DL can see through these patriarchal notions. And I just LOVE the fact that Zoyd, a man who is set up to be protagonist from the beginning, takes a huge narrative backseat for hundreds of pages to focus mainly on these three women, who end up becoming the emotional core and foundation of the entire novel, to the point where if anyone, Prairie qualifies as the book's protagonist far more than her father. Pynchon has always tried to portray women properly, and sometimes he errs, and becomes too horny for his own good. As implied, "Vineland" still includes sex, but its steadfast and humanistic grounding of these three well-developed women firmly lands it in a realm where I can consider it Pynchon's only properly feminist novel I've read thus far.

This is maybe the most formally and narratively accomplished of Pynchon's "short" novels I have read - a whiplash lightning storm of craziness and anti-establishment fervor, with far much more going for it than its detractors would have you believe. There is so much here worthy of analysis and enjoyment and I'm convinced its middling reputation is only a result of being a tough act to follow from "Gravity's Rainbow", but both novels really do feel of apiece with each other, and anyone who tells you it isn't great is tripping harder than the washed up Flower Children that inhabit this novel. What a fucking ride, maaaaaan.

"Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there are also to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you figure it out."

I have given VINELAND five stars even though I did not love it. There are four reasons. First is Pynchon’s vocabulary. His words are plentiful and seemingly limitless in variety and meaning. Keep a dictionary handy. Second is his prose. He breaks rules and defies conventions. This often makes for dense reading. But his skill for word play keeps readers engaged. Third, his stories are inherently interesting, but never predictable. VINELAND (the tale of a left-leaning grandma, her daughter and her granddaughter from the Hollywood black list era to the Reagan war on drugs) nimbly avoids predictability at every turn. Fourth, Pynchon manages the timeline of his narrative chaotically befitting a master of post-modern fiction where editors seem to have abdicated their traditional roles.

The combination makes for a worthwhile read that will reacquaint readers with a certain way of looking at the world that prevailed for a time on the U.S. west coast.