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

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.

'...being in the mafia is like eating pussy, a slip of the tongue and you could be in deep shit.' Gas, but not a fun read.

Dazed and Confused

Am I now a part of the Establishment? You know, too instep with The Man, man. Or maybe I've lost too many brain cells on some mean partying long ago to truly get Pynchon.

I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice and now Vineland. Only the first one could I not stand--what, with its shit-eating grins [literally], its patent pedophilia and insane incest.

Reading Vineland--and to a lesser degree Inherent Vice--is like being dropped into a time and place, being surrounded by a multitude of uber colorful characters, some erudite humor and a far out aura: like, the novel is bitchin' with that groovy feel of the late 60s, West Coast hippy, drug, peace and love culture. I mean, the experience is: Right On, man. But, none of the characters is developed with real depth and the story arc... well..., man, I'd like, need a crazy stash of weed to get it, you dig?

Imagine Inherent Vice but non-linear and 50% of the book is about ninjas with super powers. That’s Vineland in a nutshell.

I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Pynchon’s others. It has some of his best and worst qualities. For a book that’s only around 400 pages, there are so many characters and it’s so non-linear that it’s very easy to get lost. I would argue just as much as Gravity’s Rainbow. The supposed protagonist, Zoyd, disappears for most of the story, and he is replaced by multitudes thinly-relatable personalities.

For half of the book, the story weaves a tapestry of stoners, government agents, musicians, death cultists, and..ghosts (I think and links all them together. I’m honestly not sure), and three generations of women connected to Zoyd.

The story is set in the 80’s but often flashbacks to the 60’s and 70’s. At the heart of it all is a bittersweet tale of a family that’s trying to find its way back together. Unfortunately, much of this is shoved aside and replaced by a focus on Japanese culture and government conspiracies.

The villain of the novel, Brock Vond, is well-written. If Reagan is the epitome of evil, Vond is his right hand man. He is the personification of “The Man”, representing all that is wrong with post-World War 2 American oppression. The war on drugs, the squashing of personal freedoms, and erosion of self-awareness are all covered.

There’s plenty of marijuana and cocaine but TV is the ultimate high, and personal favourite of the masses when it comes to numbing the senses. Pynchon seems to be obsessed with the implications that Pop Culture is an accomplice to the woes of the individual but I could be wrong.

The beginning and the end of the book are pretty great. There are also one or two emotionally powerful moments that took me by surprise (Pynchon has a habit of doing this). If he had reduced some of the subplots, and focused more on the family I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed it more.

All of the themes explored are fascinating. However, Pynchon focuses on so many at the same time that I felt bewildered, confused, and ultimately exhausted the majority of the time.

Vineland is a frustrating experience. I really fought through it and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved when it was over. But it does have a lot of great qualities. Overall, it’s an endurance test, not one I’d recommend lightly, but I’m glad I experienced it.

P.s. I hope Paul Thomas Anderson is really adapting it. Everything seems to point to it but it’s still not confirmed. Rumour has it that he is replacing the Reagan era with Trumpland. Inherent Vice, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 are loosely related so who knows, maybe he wants to make a trilogy of sorts.

Pynchon Ranked:

1. Gravity’s Rainbow
2. Mason & Dixon
3. Inherent Vice
4. The Crying of Lot 49
5. Slow Learner
6. Vineland

Ex-hippies gather ‘round the campfire to tell each other stories of how they fought and lost the war against the fascist Man as they drift through the Reagan years, and if they exaggerate ‘em, well, that’s OK, ‘cuz they’ve got each other and the future, so why get caught up on the details? The line between pop culture and reality is blurrier than it’s ever been before, celebrities are rewriting history and private eyes are on the trail of Godzilla, but that doesn’t matter when you’re dancing, now does it? In 20 years this might be my fave Pynchon, I think it’ll age better than his others.

Time for another rereading of this "minor" Pynchon novel, in advance of the likely release of a film adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson later this year. Pynchon's ongoing, chaotic history of dissent in the belly of the Amerikan beast should find new readers in our current era of petty fascist wannabes.

The story of three generations of cultural rebels, the novel is also another of Pynchon's explorations of chaos, shaped (or distorted) by history but also by the bubble of beloved-but-inane culture in which we spend our lives. Here the bubble is mostly television and film: cop shows, Godzilla, Gilligan's Island, Asian action movies, and lots more.

Vineland is on the edge of the New World's Pacific coast, but it's also a borderland to mystic places, including the Land of the Dead, where good, evil, and indifference become secondary considerations. This one is lighter weight than most of Pynchon's work, but under the glitter lie some serious truths about our national character.

“Then again, 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 you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity-‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.’ If the president can act like this why not —.” It appears Thomas Pynchon got it in 1984. This novel is in my Top Twenty All Time!
In following the tangled threads of political resistance, sexual desire and the integrity of personal codes of conduct in the lives of his charismatic characters from the 1960’s to 1984 when he wrote Vineland, Pynchon lays bare human interactions and motivations that are timeless. They are all too relevant.
Beyond his prescience, what vaults this book into my literary stratosphere are the many notes he strikes with elegant sureness and conviction. It is devastatingly funny, musically hip, light years ahead of its contemporary novels in its clear-eyed, natural respect of women and of other marginalized people, politically savvy, and historically deep and unsparingly researched. Some dangling quotes to lure you in:
“They are sarariman, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and feel only contempt for those who can.”
“his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking.”
“Everybody’s a squealer. We are in th’ Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you’re telling the man more than you meant to don’t matter if it’s big or small, he can use it all.” (Written in 1984?, Damn!)
“When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.” (Dick Cheney anyone?)
“To have said and done nothing is a great power,” Rex quoted Talleyrand, “but it should not be abused.”
“About the only thing’ll get a fascist through’s his charm. The news folks love it.” (I’m writing this review in 2020. Guess who I’m thinking of?)
And finally, one my kids might especially relate to, “He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father.”
Great writer, my favorite of his novels. Like rain in the desert.

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.

Vineland is an extremely good book which commits the grave sin of not being perfect in comparison to Pynchon's other novels. It's all here: the characters, the absurdity, the little Pynchonian musical interludes- it just doesn't connect in the same way that Gravity's Rainbow or Inherent Vice connected (Zoyd/Hector are basically the trial version of Doc/Bigfoot from IV, but they're charming in their own right, too). What sets this book apart from the author's other works and keeps it from becoming forgettable is that this is easily the most sentimental Pynchon I've read. At the heart of this convoluted, deliriously satirical novel is the story of a girl, Prairie, searching for the mother that abandoned her before she was old enough to remember her. It's quite a nice story if you strip away the weirdness.

Also, Paul Thomas Anderson (aka the only director ballsy enough to adapt Pynchon) has said that this is his favorite of the author's novels, and it definitely isn't unfilmable, so we'll just have to wait and see...

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...

cannot follow what is going on and I give up.