Vineland

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.

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.

5th book of 2022.

2.5. I'm almost with ol' H. Bloom on this one [1], but not quite so violently. I didn't find it brilliant, and it's a shame as I was expecting to be in the Vineland-defence crowd, who support it against the claims that it's weak compared to his bigger and more literary giants. Pynchon once cited Kerouac as a big influence and I'm a fan too and I definitely felt his ghost within elements of this novel. It's a rollicking romp of 1984 America off the back of the 60s and its counterculture, set in Vineland, California (the only US state I've been to myself). Without the sort of 'literariness' of Gravity's Rainbow (which came some 17 years prior to this) it's a mad Pynchonland fest that didn't seem entirely worth it for the silliness and the work. It's filled, as ever, with strange characters with strange names, Zoyd Wheeler being our main guy, it's filled with Star Trek references [2] for some reason, ninjas, cops, and altogether is known as a blend of daytime drama, political thriller, Kung Fu movie [3] [4] and typical Pynchon paranoia. I liked elements of the plot and really didn't care for others, it felt quite long even at just 'Pynchon-lite' size of 400-ish pages and some of the digressions were boredom inducing. The overarching theme of the novel, which is, I think, family, as well as the state of America, was great but only in the end did it really start to emerge and everything got wrapped up too nicely and almost pathetically for me to care. Pynchon did leave me shutting the book with a sweet feeling in my stomach, having written a wonderful final line. Bits were funny but generally I don't think I found it as funny as T.R.P. imagined it would be, but then again, I already knew from previous reads, him and I have a very different sense of humour. It's taken me a while to read this, a bit every day without really trying too hard to get to the end, and I'm glad it's done. Hoping to read some of the bigger ones of his this year or next. Bloom was a little bit harsh, but he's not entirely wrong. It's meant to be fun and I wonder if it should be considered much more than that, maybe not. Anyway, I just didn't have fun.
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[1] 'Our most distinguished living writer of narrative fiction—I don't think you would quite call him a novelist—is Thomas Pynchon, and yet that recent book Vineland was a total disaster. In fact, I cannot think of a comparable disaster in modern American fiction. To have written the great story of Byron the lightbulb in Gravity's Rainbow, to have written The Crying of Lot 49 and then to give us this piece of sheer ineptitude, this hopelessly hollow book that I read through in amazement and disbelief, and which has not got in it a redeeming sentence, hardly a redeeming phrase, is immensely disheartening.'
—The Paris Review interview.

[2] Rilly.

[3] Rilly? Rilly.

[4] You'd think that would sell it for me, my job being a Wing Chun Kung Fu instructor for a school and having, this year, opened my own school with a friend, but really the Kung Fu Pynchon is talking about is the sort of Kung Fu that gives Kung Fu the reputation of being 'fake' or even 'not real'. Recently answering someone what I did for work, they paused and said, "Wait, Kung Fu is real? I thought it was made-up for movies!"

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'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.

è come provare, leggendo, l’effetto di una sbornia di tetris (nella vita 1 fui nel tunnel, so di cosa parlo). ci sono un mucchio di forme colorate che piovono dall’alto, e istintivamente cerchi di far quadrare tutto: nuovi personaggi, riferimenti, sottoplot, collegamenti.
solo che a differenza del giochetto inventato dai russi, mano a mano che procedi, a galvanizzarti non è il meccanismo di gratificazione-da-illusione-di-controllo che gli psicologi chiamano effetto zeigarnik (e chi fosse il signor zeigarnik mi guardo bene dal chiederlo) bensì il suo opposto. cioè la resa incondizionata all’invenzione e alla pirotecnica dell’autore, e al tipo di critica che le alimenta.
conta godersi lo spettacolo, insomma, che pynchon infarcisce di simboli da pop culture sporcati di riflessioni da esegeta del declino americano, o viceversa. ci si lascia travolgere dal beato effetto di spaesamento lisergico, sedurre dalla prosa, coinvolgere dal riconoscimento di quel che di vero c’è dietro ogni sparata sugli ideali infrantisi nel decennio reaganiano.
non so se anche pynchon alla lunga provochi un ispessimento della corteccia nei lobi frontali, e un ampliamento delle facoltà cognitive e del pensiero razionale. il tetris sembrerebbe provato di sì. però so di sicuro che, come taglia corto quel fallimentare big lebowski che è lo zoyd wheeler di questo romanzo, «finché è durata, ci siamo divertiti un mondo».

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.

Me rindo. Cuando te da tanta pereza coger un libro que parece que lo estás leyendo obligado es mejor decir basta. Y eso que al principio me enganchó; tengo debilidad por el humor absurdo y los personajes estrambóticos de los que está bien servida Vineland. Pero conforme avanzaba la lectura tenía cada vez la sensación de no estar yendo a ningún sitio.

Pynchon se mueve aquí en espirales que van abarcando cada vez más personajes a los que dedica unas páginas antes de pasar al siguiente, como un espectáculo de circo. Pero en el circo todo funciona mientras el espectador esté pendiente de un "más difícil todavía". Si juegas con la sorpresa no puedes permitirte repetirte.

Y justo esa ha sido la sensación que me ha llevado a abandonar. Los nuevos personajes no me aportaban nada nuevo, y ya no encontraba interés en intentar averiguar por dónde iba a continuar la trama. La espiral se había convertido en un círculo del que no encontraba salida. Salvo, literalmente, abandonándolo.