Maybe relative to Pynchon's other works I've read it'd be more like four stars, but probably not. I heartily enjoyed it. Humor, tenderness, otherworldliness, paranoia... I did often have to reread paragraphs, pages, not so much because the subject matter was hard to grapple with, as in other TP reads, but because the infinitely flowing, luxuriously punctuated sentences were sleuth's work to parse. But I found that fun, mostly. I think PTA should make a movie of this.

4.5

Someone explain how V. is superior to this in any way. I probably won't listen, but I applaud the hypothetical effort.

Pynchon here is so funny and tragic and zany and not that hard to read and even in 1990 he was interested in taking down copaganda shows from the American consciousness, an ACAB king.

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.

An interesting, entertaining, outlandish, fairly comprehensible novel set in 1984 in the fictional town of Vineland, California. There are a number of interesting characters who we learn about through their backstories, the plot twists and turns unpredictably, there are lots of weird songs - some quite funny and there is a satisfactory plot resolution. It's about the relationship of the State and the individual, who wield's power and who resists.

Zoyd Wheeler marries Frenesi and they have one child, Prairie. In 1984 Prairie is 14 years old and seeks out her mother, who disappeared shortly after giving birth to Prairie. Frenesi is a film maker / camera person who films riots. In the 1960s she meet and fell in love with Brock. Brock is an FBI agent who wields a lot of power, being able to command a group of men on a variety of military type activities. North of Vineland is a group known as Thanatoids who are addicted to watching television and movies. The people who live in Vineland and the Thanatoids were part of the hippy culture of the 1960s. Pynchon explores how the hippies of the 1960s ended up voting for Reagan in the 1980s.

If you are new to Pynchon, Vineland is a good place to start. (I have only read Gravity's Rainbow, Cry Lot 49 and V, and found Gravity's Rainbow very hard to follow, especially the last third of the book).

This book certainly encourages me to read Pynchon's other books. A very worthwhile read.

«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.

What's worse than reading a bad book? Reading a bad book that was written by one of your favourite writers. Being objective about it, you can't love everything a favourite writer, band or movie director does. Vineland is well known to be Pynchon's worst, but there are some who like it and think it's underrated. The good things about it are that it is Pynchon, it's hard to think of another person that writes the way he does, so it is unique and in places beautifully written, but there's just something lacking, it's tired, which is weird because it took 17 years from Gravity's Rainbow to this. It's also bitter as some people have pointed out, Pynchon lived through this time, with people he knew and so this can be said, that this is his most personal novel till this point and probably of all his work. But I don't think it's the bitter or pissed off that creates genius. I find parts of this novel obvious, over exaggerating, over reaching, it's like the people today screaming and crying that the evil orange cheeto man is literally Hitler, but instead, Reagan is literally Hitler. So this book is quite petty at times, which is disappointing. Is it the worst book ever? No, it has redeeming qualities, the writing, the push of story, I can't say that it's boring, but it is my least favourite book by Pynchon and I now can move on to Bleeding Edge, the only book I haven't read by Pynchon.

Right... where to start. My first Pynchon. I was actually tempted to give it four stars but part of that was because it fills you with a healthy amount of paranoia against those in power. There is so much outlandish crap spread around these days that i think we begin to overlook all the real conspiracies and corruption out of some sort of mental backlash.
Anyway... the plot such as it is... you remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homers mother turns up who's been on the run since the sixties? Its a bit like that with occasional channel interference from Kill Bill and maybe Godzilla.
About 90% of it is flashback, although they're not so much flashs as bleeds. The transitions from time to time and place to place are quite something as you can never seem to see them until after they've happened.
It can make finding a natural stopping place (their are no chapters) a little hard. You'll be a couple of pages into a new section following new people before you've even figured out that the change happened.

It seems at times stream of consciousness writing with the occasional pool of magical realism. Still not quite sure what a Thanathoid is... i'm thinking ghost zombie nihilist :lol.
Other idiosyncrasies of the author are the various songs thrown in and dream sequences the latter being completely pointless and the former not meaning much to me but perhaps more interesting for those of a musical inclination. About 20% of the book feels like it could have been cut without in anyway effecting the story, and i'm probably being generous with what i consider to be relevant.

There are also two major mysteries in the book, one of why the badguy is doing what he's doing and one about why another character did what she did in the past. Neither of which are really resolved but given the nature of the story i suspected there would be no easy answers so i wasn't too annoyed by that. Also given the type of story i expected it to end with a whimper rather than a bang and was correct on that too, although fadeout instead of whimper might be more accurate.

I like stream of conciousness, 60's-80's america etc. there was a lot i liked here but perhaps too chaotic to love.

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.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Vineland. I know it's not Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow, which I hold near and dear to my heart, but damn, certain parts really stick with me. I mean, if you're a fan of Pynchon, please give it a shot. You'll definitely find at least something to love, and the ending actually wound up pretty damn poignant (you heard it here, there's a Pynchon novel with a non-confusing ending, a simple scene that while it doesn't wrap up every plot thread – let's not go crazy – does provide a final step).

Vineland is Pynchon somewhere between the grandiose chaos of Gravity's Rainbow and the loopiness of Inherent Vice. The connection is Gordita Beach, where Doc Sportello himself probably caught a few gigs of The Corvairs with Shasta Fay at his side. Mucho Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 makes a cameo as well. I think that V. had a guy jumping through plate-glass window for kicks but I can't be sure. I can't be sure of anything anymore...

There is a lot in Vineland to admire. The plot is Pynchonesque, obviously, but never too hard to follow. There are dense slabs of prose that mine the craziness and contradictions of America and freedom and growing old and love and loss and dreams. There are puns and songs and movies and TV, and there is warmth and soul throughout. I'd recommend it.

A longer review and synopsis, of sorts, can be found at my blog The Ringer Files if you're inclined to check it out.

"...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.

'Vineland' is a singular novel, the first by Pynchon that I've read. (I had a try with 'Against the Day' years ago, but couldn't get into it before the library wanted it back.) The paranoia and drug-taking reminded me of Phillip K Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly', with the atmosphere and character focus of Don DeLillo's 'White Noise'. The writing style is distinctive, though, with rambling paragraph-sentences constantly sliding into lists. Each chapter seems to end in a sort of prose poem. For this reason and others, it required quite a lot of effort to follow what was happening, when it was happening, and why.

I'm not quite sure whether I enjoyed 'Vineland'. At times it was very funny, at times distinctly creepy, and often quite baffling. The interwoven life stories of the characters are interesting, plus I appreciate Pynchon's distinctive naming scheme. Frenesi Gates, around whom most of the action revolves, remains enigmatic in a manner I found a little frustrating. Her former partner DL is the most appealing of the bunch, although her story veers off into magical realism rather. As a portrait of America in the 1980s it is pretty unsettling, with the implication that revolutionaries of the 1960s sold out thanks to television, consumerism, and repressive government. As a novel it is effective, albeit dense and rather odd.