I’ve been doing a reread of Pynchon during these times mostly spent indoors. Embarrassing that I had never read Vineland. I am so glad I did. Damn it was good.

"When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into the most sensitive memory device, the human face."

This novel tells the story of the people whose lives were touched by Frenesi Gates, a one-time sixties radical who turns government informer and goes into hiding, abandoning her husband and young daughter.

The novel opens in the fictional Northern Californian district of 'Vineland' where Zoyd Wheeler, Frenesi's ex-husband, is living in semi-seclusion with his 14-year-old daughter, Prairie. When Zoyd learns that Prairie is being targeted by a charismatic federal prosecutor, Brock Vond, who first convinced Fresesi to betray her friends, Zoyd sends Prairie away however she is still keen to know her mother.

As the novel progresses all of the main characters converge on Vineland at the large annual reunion of Frenesi's extended family. Brock Vond lowers himself from a helicopter in an attempt to kidnap Prairie as she sleeps alone in the woods but just as he is about to grab her, the funding for his secret program is cut and it is he who is winched away.

Vineland spans from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The novel covers the paranoia of the Nixon years, the end of the hippie movement, the birth of Reaganite politics and the main themes are the corrupting influence of power and the death of idealism.

The prose is dense, Pynchon moves fluidly in his narrative from character to character and between time settings picking up and dropping plot lines seemingly at whim. Now whilst I found it marginally better than the previous novel by the author that I'd read (Crying of Lot 49) I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed this one either. Despite comments on the blurb to the contrary, I didn't find it "exhilarating and wretchedly funny" nor did I find it "beautifully structured" rather I found it self-indulgent and rather dull. What kept me going was an interest in seeing just whether Ferensi and Prairie would be reconciled and whether Vond would get his comeuppance but found the ending a let-down as well. I suspect that this will be something of a marmite book, you will either love or hate it, unfortunately I'm in the latter camp. 1.5 stars if I could.

Vineland je tzv. Pinčon-lite, stevija umesto šećera, ukus sličan, ali aftertejst (poukus?) mrvicu suviše prisutan. I ne, ne na posebno dobar način npr. palačinke nutela plazma banana ili do nedavno zamrznuta višnja (čitaj: aftertejst koji golica dijabetes).

Ono u čemu je Pinčon oduvek bio ekstremno vičan je socioekonomski osvrt kroz tekst koji, čini se, nema niđe veze ni sa socio ni sa ekonomijm, već se samo – paranoično osvrće. Ovog puta to je politički komentar na američko društvo između šezdesetih do kasnih osamdesetih, napisan zabavnim, duboko isplaniranim a opet prividno haotičnim stilom, sa klasičnim pinčonizmima gde nindžete mogu da te ubiju za zakašnjenjem od cca dvadeset godina, gde vanzemaljci redovno posećuju avione na putu za Havaje, gde jedan Vid (sp: Weed) Atman, profa matematike, nevoljni revolucionar, može da postane seks simbol jednog pokreta.

Ipak, voleo bih da je više vremena posvećeno glavnim protagonistima, jer Pinčon je oduvek umeo da dotakne iskreni sentiment sa minimalno baljezganja, ali ovde se čini da je možda mogao da se pozabavi sa triom Frenesi, Zojd, Preri mrvicu više. Tu je i najveća mana romana; Frenesi je istovremeno i objekat i subjekat, i romanu nedostaje protagonista. Radnja počne sa Zojdom koji štafetu prenese Preri, međutim ona se nekako zadesi praktično odmah pred ciljem. Roman se prosto... završi. I iako se tako završio i nadaleko čuveni rat protiv droge, ne bilo kakvom klimaktičnom akcijom, zaplenom stotina tona kanabisa, lsd-a... već prostom promenom javnog mnjenja i tabuizacijom svakog oblika psihoaktivne supstance. No roman nije (i nikad neće biti, čak bih rekao ne sme biti) stvaran svet – jer ima kraj. A Vineland to nema.

4

I can't understand why this novel been knocked so much. Pynchon's critique of the Boomer generation - how the counter-culture radicals of the 60s became the burnouts and Reaganite sellouts of the 80s - strikes me as really prescient. Especially in the present moment: the sad, hateful drama playing out right now between Trump and Biden is simply America suffering from the last pathetic, destructive throes of the Boomer generation's vice grip on power.

Plus, reading Vineland has also reaffirmed my desire to take a deep dive into Menippean satire. Rabelais and Bakhtin: I'm coming for you!

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.

Sometimes it ends up being so apt to pick up a certain book at a certain time. Written about soul-crushing repression of the spirit of rebellion, community and individuality in America from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, complete with a fictionalized literal “war on drugs,” in the real world of today we are so worse off politically and societally, that I am tempted often to look back to Nixon, Reagan and the smart/stupid father/son shrubberies nostalgically. I would love to see a rewrite of this today, or to find Pynchon wherever he is hiding these days and ask him a few questions about where he thought America was in 1990 and whether he could have imagined we’d be where we’re at now.

Don't let anyone fool you -- this is the best Pynchon novel of 'em all.

There's a bunch of reasons, but the main thing is that this one has all the fabulous Pynchonian weirdness and wackiness, but it - pretty much alone of all his works - also coheres as a well-structured novel. The characters are wonderfully alive: it's got one of the sweetest and most real father-teenage-daughter relationships in any book I've ever read, women who are complex and behave like actual people, and character motivations that actually make sense. Which I guess is to be hoped for in a novel as, y'know, a baseline, but much as I love Pynchon that's not usually his forte, see? (He oscillates between amazingly good female characters, specifically Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49 and Maxine in Bleeding Edge, and basically absent and/or protagonist-serving female characters everywhere else, so it's nice, okay? Specially since in Vineland there's several of them and they talk to each other, which is something a helluva lot of celebrated male authors manage to avoid doing.)

It's also actually the right length: not so short you agonize over why there isn't more (lookin' at you, Crying of Lot 49) or so long you need a notebook to keep track of what the hell's going on (hello, every other Pynchon book except Inherent Vice and maaaaayybe Bleeding Edge, both of which were kinda rehashes of the wonder of this one). And it's about something, which I guess a book doesn't have to be, but personally, I reeeeaallllly don't feel like Pynchon is nearly as good at writing about nothing as everyone seems to think he is. He's at his best when he's actually saying something, because he's good at that, when he bothers; all the weird shit is icing, really, on the richness of what he can convey when he can be bothered to do try.

As far as I'm concerned, Vineland is Pynchon at his least pretentious and his most honest, maybe his most humble. It's a wonderfully evocative book, full of these little fragments of precision and beauty, without the long wanderings into murk and weeds and incomprehensible subplots; it's neither self-congratulatory nor deliberately obfuscatory. Which means it's not an all-caps WORK OF GENIUS like the sprawlers (or the too-brief phantasm of Lot 49, for that matter), but it's cleaner and brighter and sweeter than any of the others, the most specific, the most real. (Someone complained in a review that it doesn't capture Humboldt County very well, but I disagree: I don't think anyone's written about the feeling of morning in the redwoods as exactly as Pynchon.) Maybe there's just too much Prairie in me to trust the rest of what he's written like I trust Vineland, but it's a human book, I guess.

This is widely regarded as Pynchon's worst book, so I can't say I had my hopes up, but I still feel disappointed. I was open to being surprised.

This book feels like Pynchon left something out. Every one of his books is a swirling mass of off-kilter characters, convoluted stories, goofy songs, disturbing profanity, but all of it swirls around a core that doesn't so much tie everything together, but serves as the gravitational force that keeps everything from flying off into outer space. But Vineland feels empty at its center. This is just a series of character backgrounds and needlessly complicated spy games.

I like when Pynchon injects his characters with some emotions--I don't think he's ever been accused of spending too much time on the inner lives of his characters--and there actually are a few of them here that I grew to care about. Zoyd, Prairie, DL... these feel more like real people than most of Pynchon's creations, so I'm disappointed that they didn't get the stories they deserve.

Pynchon has always been hit or miss for me. This one's a miss.

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…

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.

Vineland is not a good book, and just to be clear, it's not just not good by the standards of what Pynchon is capable of; it's one of the worst books I've ever read. And not even memorably so—I can't immediately think of a more instantly forgettable book, and can't imagine remembering any details of this a week from now. There aren't even any recognizable seeds of the type that often grow over time, lingering in my head and ultimately making me go from thinking that a book was mediocre to thinking that it was good, and then great, and then one of my favorites.

There are so many basic elements of this book that are unlike Pynchon that it's almost shocking to experience them. The structure here feels almost formless, unlike Pynchon's usually precise, though intricate, structures. While his structures in other works may only reveal themselves in hindsight, Vineland feels like a book that certainly wasn't written with a particular structure in mind, and barely even had one fitted to it; his best books feel defined by their shapes, and I wonder if the saggy shapelessness of this one stems from its lack of intellectual weight or vice versa. Chapter lengths vary wildly, as do the scopes of each chapter. Pynchon usually either segments his work heavily (cf. Gravity's Rainbow) or hardly at all (cf. Against the Day); here, he utilizes fairly ordinary chapter breaks, but they feel almost arbitrarily-placed, as do his less occasional asterisks within them. There are some elegant shifts of time and place, but more often transitions feel as if they're either lurching or sluggish, like Pynchon's getting the hang of a clutch with which he's unfamiliar.

There's almost nothing to be gained from this book under any circumstances, but that amount is reduced to literally nil if one's familiar with the rest of Pynchon's oeuvre. I took a few notes, mostly in the first 50 pages or so, on some recurring ideas and motifs when I was still optimistic enough to think Pynchon might be, you know, formulating a new argument, but not only did those noted elements not develop into anything, but they also merely reflect Pynchon's lifelong themes in underdeveloped form, making this his only work without its own actual thesis. (In fairness, some of the material covered here is dealt with again, and in a far superior fashion, in Inherent Vice later in Pynchon's career—which reads like Pynchon realized the best stuff in Vineland was the flashbacks and wrote a corrective of sorts comprised only of the good stuff, made much better—so it's almost cheating to say Vineland is nothing new, but I would argue that even just compared to the work of his that came before, Pynchon has no new ideas to advance here, only new real-world developments upon which to map them.) Vineland is the only book of Pynchon's where he's trying absolutely nothing new, and those kinds of efforts, and the accompanying possibility of failure, is what more than anything brings life to a book.

It's not worth going much into what the book is actually about, except to say that one of the central motifs is of zeroes and ones in binary numbers. A few different metaphors are aligned with this concept, and the simplicity of them is in keeping with the simplicity of the ideas being presented. It's the transition between the two sides of a black-and-white world that manages to be interesting at times here, with Pynchon showcasing the lies people tell themselves to allow themselves to be corrupted (like data corruption, see? That's about the depth of thought that's to be found in this book) and the slow process of compromising one's character. There's also a slick idea, if anything one that seems a bit too evident to be considered original exactly, about the underlying desire of Americans of all ideologies for an authoritarian government to ultimately tell them how to live, which among other parallels to the current-day political climate should have theoretically enhanced the relevance of this book, but couldn't manage to do so even slightly.

The book certainly isn't incoherent or anything; Pynchon's work almost never is, despite his reputation. The trouble, in one sense, is that it's almost too coherent, and too rigorously so. There are almost none of the extracurricular excursions and flights of fancy that are often the best parts of Pynchon's work, highlights that serve not to emphasize themselves but to shine a light on the main narrative by way of their departure from it. One imagines that it's largely as a result of this absence that Vineland reads as completely unenjoyable; there are very, very occasional flashes of inspiration, and even delight, I grudgingly admit, but it mostly feels like Pynchon's being Pynchon at gunpoint, serving up what prose concoctions and witticisms he can come up with despite having no foundation for his material. As if to make up for the lack of actual interludes, most of the book is written in the jauntier style typically indicative of them, but this tone, combined with a heavy-handed single-note theme and a plot that remains oppressively present at all times.

A heavy theme dealt with lightly sounds appealing, at least on paper (see how Pynchon so effortlessly presents Inherent Vice as a lark that you don't even realize how wrenching the material is until you've finished), but there's a monotonic, monolithic nature to Pynchon's screed against the rampant authoritarianism of the Reagan eighties. In Inherent Vice, Pynchon got to write about a cresting wave, where there was still a valid sense of pervasive uncertainty, a mood of unexplained mystery as to how things would turn out, as well as an underlying hopefulness not present here (except for the awful ending, more on which later). Vineland is about an America now well and truly curdled; there's no room for uncertainty because the state of affairs is so obvious, which means that there's also no opportunity for proper paranoia, and there's an undifferentiated bitterness to both the characters and Pynchon's writing that gets tiresome rather quickly, no matter how merited it may be. Weighed down by the unimpeachable truths at its center, Vineland remains stolidly earthbound throughout, never transcending or taking flight in the way Pynchon's works usually do, neither in terms of the writing quality or the ideas espoused.

The unvarying nature of the theme and the style make one realize that one of the things that has always been very appealing about Pynchon is his ability to change tempo and time signature; not only is the extremely limited range on display here dreary in its own right, but it also costs us the gift of seeing Pynchon's virtuosic transitional abilities on display once more. (The one tone he's more or less stuck in rings sourly in a couple of ways too, with Pynchon often coming across as both leering and excessively sappy.) Pynchon limits his ambition in other ways, too; he works with a quite limited set of characters, and within rather limited geographical constraints, which he had been successful doing previously in The Crying of Lot 49 and would be successful with again later in his career, with Mason & Dixon and Inherent Vice, but is decidedly not successful with here. In part, it's because his central father-daughter duo are perhaps the thinnest characters he's ever written, which is hilarious, because Pynchon specializes in deploying intentionally thinly-written characters for one purpose only. But they always add something to the story, even if only one thing, whereas Zoyd and Prairie feel like complete absences—and not structuring ones either.

It doesn't help that Frenesi, an actual structuring absence, ultimately proves to essentially have been a red herring for both Zoyd and Prairie (and us, for that matter); it's a high-wire act for Pynchon to structure the proceedings around someone who, of course, can't be what the people searching for her want to be. It's an utterly sensible concept—perhaps even too much so—but makes for bad literature, leading to a double whammy of an anticlimax. Another risky move of Pynchon's is his choice, in his indictment of television's stultifying effect on Americans, to imbue his narrative with vapid clichés borrowed from typical television storylines and tropes, but without turning them on their head in any interesting way. (Another of the many wastes of this book is that Pynchon features a filmmaking collective, partly as a motif in opposition to television, and wastes his knowledge of and love for film by showcasing it more than ever in a book where it serves mostly as a facile metaphor.)

The weaknesses of the central characters stand out not just because they have so little load-bearing capacity, but because too much of the total load is placed on a very few characters rather than being more spread out, as is usual in a Pynchon novel. He's never been dependent on his characters bearing much weight at all necessarily, and the first time he really tried to ask that of them happened to be the time they were also his weakest characters. (Besides being weak in their own right, there's nothing convincing about the parental relationships here; those in Bleeding Edge really stand out as far superior—which makes sense, given he had at that point over twenty years of parenting experience, as opposed to none at this point—and much of the rest of that book looks a whole lot less dire, too, by comparison.)

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.

n  

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

n

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.

n  

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

n

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.

n  

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.

n

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.