Not my favorite Pynchon, but definitely due for a reread after 25 years now.

So when you think of Pynchon you think of serious work, right? And trudgery and difficulty and obfuscation and pedanticism, and like this dizzying thing that just makes you feel unintellectual and slow for never being able to catch up, right?

Well if that is the case, you have never read n  Vinelandn. Because oh. my. god. This book is so fucking good.

I'm not going to try to summarize or anything, because this book is too sprawling and reeling, and anyway that would be an afront to its amazingness. But look, it's got all the same basic building blocks as any Pynchon book—a million characters exhaustively historied, unfollowable plot twists, crazy ranting paranoia, incredibly phraseology, bizarre songs, sixties culture, sex and violence (in fact, large swaths are oddly comparable to Kill Bill, if you ask me)—but it's done at a much...easier level somehow. It's much more accessible, it's hilarious and warm, and you don't feel like you're in quicksand the whole time, just desperately trying to understand and keep breathing.

See, people never talk about the really unimaginable joy that soars through Pynchon's work. And beauty! I mean look, this book is tough, for sure, and I won't try to claim that I understood everything, but honestly it just doesn't matter. It's just so much fun to read. It's not work at all.

And the ending! Once I had like thirty pages left I started getting that dark foreboding feeling, you know, like there's no way he can end this satisfactorily, there just isn't enough space. I was so sure he was going to do something horrible, leaving everything messy and unfulfilling, end things like right in the middle of a sentence or something, but no! The ending was beautiful, just like the rest of the book, totally satisfying and wonderful. Jeez I loved this book. Wow.

I don’t usually finish a book and start a review in the same breath. But I also don’t usually allow myself to read more than one of an author’s works within a calendar year (many books, little time, etc. -- though of course Stephen King would be this year’s other exception because the Tower, all things yield to it): T. Ruggs, you magnificant bastard, I hope you know how many personal rules I’m violating because you’re the first time since auspiciously picking up my first collection of Bukowski poems that I’ve been able to add a This Writer Changed My Life For Always notch to my literary bedpost. Reading “Vineland” confirmed what “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me suspecting: I bloody love Thomas Pynchon. Rilly.

Finishing “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me with an almost obscene urge to help myself to another serving of Pynchon, which is an urge I’ve been fighting for months now. I finally caved, intending to take on “V” but settling for “Vineland” because part of the joy of Pynchon is the inherent madness, and I just can’t handle another meaty tome yet (the latter weighs in at a few pages shy of 400; the former.... uh, does most assuredly not). And because I haven’t talked about GR enough, I am still a little battered from that experience (my opinion on bananas might be forever changed, too). I needed something a little less daunting first. Enter: “Vineland.”

This book was so good. Now being able to pinpoint a Pynchonian pattern – a few: musical outbursts, sleuthing plots, oddball character names, stunning tangents that really aren’t that tangential after all, a natural vocabulary only found in the most ruthless of Scrabble opponents – helped me identify what I adore most about Pynchon’s prose. It’s his ability to concoct some of the most overtly zany scenes in literature, to confront the reader with these in-your-face storms of hilarity for the sake of maximizing the subtle tragedies he gently lets the story consider, leaving the reader to marinate in sadness. It’s an effect that would be any mixture of sloppy, condescending, formulaic or tedious if attempted by anyone else but Pynchon makes it work. The real success is that his characters who need be sympathetic are so when someone realizes that her best days are behind her or comes to the dawning realization that he’s being used by an entire government or has an ugly epiphany about the mother she never knew, it is the most heartbreaking scene in the world.

As for the effort involved in decoding the obscure references that are sprinkled throughout Pynchon’s books as liberally as the Bacon Bits on any salad worth eating, I was deeply grateful that T. Ruggs's novel begins the same year as I did, which meant I caught waywayWAAAAY more cultural allusions this time. The narrative flows better when I’m not running to a secondary source every three lines and I appreciated the opportunity to enjoy this book less haltingly, which isn't to say that I didn't need to have a few reference materials handy. There were enough hazy hippie memories to keep me on my toes, though I caught a number of those as often as I had a flutter of joyful recognition every time The Doors or Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or some other People's Republic of Rock and Roll favorite got a shout-out.

I feel a reread of "The Crying of Lot 49" and maybe "Inherent Vice" in my future. Color me fucking amped.

This novel is great, and I’m glad that I decided to read it again. Although often described as ‘Pynchon-lite’, I think this novel is more in the tradition of Pynchon’s great works than it's often credited as being, and I think it’s been under-appreciated.

The plot of Vineland is nominally about the search for Frenesi Gates. The themes of Vineland are nominally connected to the end of the hippie movement, and the birth of Reaganite politics. But the book is also about so much more. Like most Pynchon novels, Vineland is very much concerned with the corrupting influence of power and the death of idealism. It may not be as viscerally shocking as Gravity’s Rainbow, nor is it as dark, but Vineland is every bit as cynical. Whereas Gravity’s Rainbow focused on the dehumanising effects of war, and the inexorable path through war towards degeneracy, Vineland is more concerned with ideological death, and with the corrupting influence of greed. Its main focus is on how the hippie movement died, and how its exponents transformed into enablers of the very forces they were ostensibly fighting against.

"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined, "nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap...."

Vineland is also about the Thanatoids, a subculture who have become so dependent on television, that they are unable to meaningfully function without its constant input. I think this concept has been developed further in our society since this book was published, as we have found more and more efficient ways to pump constant feeds of information into our brains. This was a process that was once rooted to a finite number of physical locations, where televisions were wired up and plugged in. Thankfully, these days, we've found a way to make the process portable!

What this novel very definitely is not, is a comedy. Sure, there’s a lot of wacky scenes, as there always are in Pynchon, but I think to focus on them is to miss what’s actually going on. Pynchon is a master of marrying the wacky with the terrifying. This novel is full of hijinks, but it is also a completely cynical reflection on a human inability to make cultural progress. It’s not really about slipping over on banana peels - it’s about how hopes and dreams find themselves on a collision course with death. Vineland is partly about the process of ageing, but it’s also about becoming a person which our younger self would hate, and letting that happen for reasons that our young self would not understand, and which even our older self may secretly resent. A large part of this novel is about why people give up on their dreams, and how they rationalise their decision as something which is good and right and inevitable.

This book is great. I love it. At this moment, it’s up with Gravity’s Rainbow as one of my favourite Pynchon novels. I’ve read most of his books, but this is only the second novel of his that I’ve re-read. I don’t think I really appreciated it the first time.

This long progress of postings into what she called Midol America because it always felt like her period...

Hey, Pynchon reused this joke in Bleeding edge! And he also reused Brock Vond in Nicholas Windust, right? What can I say, I liked BE better, I thought BE was funnier. I would even say that in Inherent Vice and Bleeding edge combined he rewrote this novel and did it better, 20 years later.

On the other hand, this is Pynchon at his most political, disappointed, sad. He was still young-ish man and 70s were not that far away.

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’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.’

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.

Did he really think that? Does he think that still?

So I'm conflicted. On the one hand it's still Pynchon and the man is brilliant, and this book was tucked between two masterpieces of his which didn't help. On the other hand, this book lost the plot somewhere by the end, just like Against the day, although, thankfully, this didn't feel as disappointing and a waste of time. I would recommend this to Pynchon fans only. This is my 7th Pynchon, what an adventure!

P.S. Apparently Thomas Paul Anderson is a huge fan, even going so far as to say:
“There’s a stack of books I haven’t read yet,” he told Indiewire's Eric Kohn in a 2014 Inherent Vice interview, “and yet I find myself constantly re-reading Vineland.
and may I remind you that the guy was taught by DFW himself, so that's that, and you can look forward to the movie. There's some secret one he's making in Sacramento at the moment, with DiCaprio.

Probably not the best Pynchon I have read, but what certainly could be my favorite. A fun romp through 80's paranoia with incredibly drawn characters and a pretty linear plot. This was my 4th Pynchon in a little over a year, and next to DFW, he is probably my favorite discovery from GR.

Vineland would be a great entry point into the world of Pynchon. It's not too heavy, but it is incredibly written and at times laugh out loud funny. And it even has a sweet ending. Tremendous fun!

Pynchon's feds and heads novel, mostly set in the bad old days of the Reagan war on drugs (which, given the AG's announcement yesterday, may return any day now). With the gloss of time on it, this book feels like a second, lesser chapter of The Crying of Lot 49, the paranoia carried to comic ends and the deep vale of history replaced by the Tube. It's chaotic, unstructured, occasionally very funny, and another riff on the author's constant themes of freedom and what pretends to be freedom in America and the wider world. Definitely on Pynchon's B list but still more entertaining than similar books about the same era by other writers.

best way i can think to describe this right now is like if lord of the rings was about the war on drugs

60. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Published: 1990
format: 385 page paperback
acquired: 2007 from the annual Houston Public Library book sale
read: Sep 9-23
rating: 3 stars

Back when I bought this I had only a vague idea of who Pynchon was. I was excited to get this book, then disappointed to learn that no one actually likes it. (That's an exaggeration. There is a nice review here) But, I'm reading all of Pynchon (maybe) and this was next. And, I was intrigued that this was Pynchon's first new work in 17 years, even if it takes place in 1984, only 6 years before publication. Mason & Dixon was in progress and Vineland was maybe something extra Pynchon did as he worked through that. In any case, I never did get into it.

In a lot of ways this is a sequel to The Crying of Lot 49. Like TCoL49, it takes place in California, and is a somewhat unclear emotional response to US political realities. TCoL49 was about the JFK assassination (not that I could have told you that from reading the book). Vineland is about the revolutionary spirit of the sixties and it's reactionary counter under Nixon...and about the fallout of all that years later.

There are universal Pynchon characteristics - there is the low-key Pynchon alter-ego non-hero. Here it's a unemployed, hapless musician Zoid Wheeler. And there is Pynchon wackiness, here a bit forced in the form of a rush-trained and somewhat flawed ninja, and a whole community of generally charming un-dead, the thanatoids.

The novel begins with Zoid, who lives cooped up in the forests of northern California, supported by government checks for a faked mental instability the requires him to annually jump through a window. He raises his 14-yr-old daughter Prairie in a self-built home, and continually mourns for her mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi (Spanish for frenzy) lived him for maybe two years, had sexual flings of some intensity, then divorced him and then disappeared. And Zoid is ever enraptured.

Frenesi is the novel's centerpiece and captivates everyone, maybe a variation on V. She crossed the divide of late 1960's between left-wing revolutionaries and the Nixonian conservative governmental crackdown. She was deeply involved with a revolutionary group whose colorful characters may or may not make up for the fact that I never understood what their aims were, while becoming a traitor in cooperation with a rogue FBI agent, mock unstoppable stud-hero Brock Vond. She had a lot of sex with Vond and a key revolutionary, falling hard for Vond. The fallout of her actions leads to Zoid and then to a witness protection program (and another partner and another child). Unfortunately for her and Vond, Reagan cuts funding and sets the events of 1984 in motion. Zoid's jealousy hurts, but he's such a small extra in Frenesi's story, that it really comes to nothing. But Prairie, the girl longing for her mother, provides a more human emotional source that we readers can sympathize with.

My take on Pynchon is that he wants to find a human element while maintaining a satirical distance and an underlying seriousness. This is something he managed in V. and Gravity's Rainbow. Unlike those novels, this one is pretty straight-forward and actually an easy read. I could name a few apparent flaws - the rushed, dull, hundred pages filling up on the background of secondary characters, and the general lack of narrative drive. At the end of the book the writing wanders more on the sentence level, and the book slows down and actually gets way more interesting. Pynchon seems to do best when incorporating so much vast complexities and details, that he obscures other problems with the narrative.

Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits...

A ginormous set of characters stomping around Northern California and beyond, doing weird shit as the national culture shifts its goalposts around them. Zoyd leaps through windows, more a symbolic penance than any true means of escape. Hector is so addicted to television that it's impossible to know what he knows to be true and what's an invention of his deluded mind. Frenesi is a snitch on the federal payroll at a time when computers are leading the heartless beauracratic charge to find ways to cut the budget. And Brock Vond is the unseen but mighty arm of a government keen on flexing its muscles. These and other lunatic fringe types mix and mingle as everybody moves from one side of the law to the other, some with ease and some with painful consequence.

...Frenesi now popped the Tube on and checked the listings. (83)

Pynchon confronts the lines between fantasy and reality in this TV-soaked and cinema-saturated trek through the recent past. Borrowing cues from 70s cop dramas, Kung Fu, and c., camp meets compassion as Pynchon makes worlds collide in a kaleidoscopic fireworks display.

3.5 stars. Since I doubt anyone comes to Vineland without some other Pynchon already, I'll do the old compare and contrast here: I thought it was similar to but a lot denser than Inherent Vice, and I enjoyed rolling things around symbollically like some kind of artsy-fartsy wine tasting where Thunderbird and Boone's Farm are considered top-shelf. It's fun and often funny but Pynchon still makes you work for it. At least here we follow a straightforward plot, unlike Gravity's Rainbow or V. Because of this the book is much less puzzling and much less of an academic's wet dream - so it lives in the shadow of Pynchon's greater hits, but it's also that much more accessible.

For as big of a fall from Pynchon's first three novels as it is, and for as massive as an improvement as follow-ups were, it's hard to really stay mad at Vineland. While V. and The Crying of Lot 49 were fine novels in their own right, they also seem to function as lead-ups to Gravity's Rainbow, far and away the peak of early-period Pynchon, and arguably all of Pynchon's career, although Mason and Dixon puts up a good challenge in that regard. After you've hit your peak, where is there to go but down?

I'm probably making Vineland out to seem like a weaker novel than it really is, and it has its problems, true. It butts up against being a little too paranoid, its issues with government, authority, etc. threatening to cross from the well-informed screeds of Gravity's Rainbow to "hippies vs. THE MAN." The characters never really take off in the same way that Tyrone Slothrop, Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, or later creations like Pynchon's reinterpreted Mason and Dixon or hell, even Doc Spordello and Bigfoot Bjornsen do. The pacing is weirdly lurching, and while some of the digressions are all sorts of fun, others just aren't as interesting as they'd been in the past. And the TV subplot is a little too "WAKE UP, SHEEPLE" for my liking.

Still, isn't a fundamental part of Pynchon's charm in the fact that he walks the line between genius and kook? Isn't the whole point of him that it's hard to tell where the one ends and the other begins? Besides, Vineland has a lot going for it, if you accept that the pleasures here are more modest than those found within GR. A lot of the things Pynchon usually does well are done well here: it's funny, both with the one-liners and the absurd situations, the bizarro-world L.A., full of ninjas and death cults, is a terrifically constructed universe (Neal Stephenson would build a cult following on this sort of thing in just a few years), and Pynchon's prose is magnificent as ever.

So it's not an exceptional novel, but what goes up has got to come down, and given that Pynchon had just ascended to the literary stratosphere, this could've been a much bigger fall than it was. Besides, it's easy for me to imagine that there are a good half-dozen incomplete prospective fourth Pynchon novels strewn around the good man's study, and while some are probably better, some are probably also too much like GR to justify publication. So let's split the difference and call this either a modest success rather than a noble failure, why don't we?

The story of a family of washed-up 60s hippy rebels, set in Northern California in the 80s. Full of very well-drawn characters and written in a dense, highly imaginative, humorous, and entertaining style. This novel is also a socio-political analysis and depicts the growing rift between the U.S. government and its justifiably rebellious populace during the Nixon-Reagan era.