I have given VINELAND five stars even though I did not love it. There are four reasons. First is Pynchon’s vocabulary. His words are plentiful and seemingly limitless in variety and meaning. Keep a dictionary handy. Second is his prose. He breaks rules and defies conventions. This often makes for dense reading. But his skill for word play keeps readers engaged. Third, his stories are inherently interesting, but never predictable. VINELAND (the tale of a left-leaning grandma, her daughter and her granddaughter from the Hollywood black list era to the Reagan war on drugs) nimbly avoids predictability at every turn. Fourth, Pynchon manages the timeline of his narrative chaotically befitting a master of post-modern fiction where editors seem to have abdicated their traditional roles.

The combination makes for a worthwhile read that will reacquaint readers with a certain way of looking at the world that prevailed for a time on the U.S. west coast.

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.

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.

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.

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

While not for me his strongest book, Vineland shows very Pychonian characters trying to work out their relationships to each other. There is even a big Hollywood style ending (probably a pastiche/parody) to the story. I found that the backdrop was less the chaos and anarchy that I appreciated in Gravity's Rainbow, Mason&Dixon and Against the Day and so I appreciated this one less than those. I would put it low in the Pychon canon but still suggest that it is worth reading for his insights into California hippyism which are often hilarious and sometimes poignant.

Pynchon's most underrated, I think - a bighearted, funky read; a worthy 3rd "V" book.

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.)

Pynchon escribe dos tipos de novelas, unas de cientos de páginas, enormes en todos los sentidos, tanto en tamaño como en lo que abarcan, siendo todo un viaje a lo largo de diferentes épocas y momentos históricos; y después están las novelas con menos páginas, más ligeras aparentemente, donde se reconoce a un Pynchon más suelto, por llamarlo de alguna manera, más humorístico y divertido, sin faltar ese toque conspiratorio y paranoico. ‘Vineland’ pertenece a este segundo grupo.

La historia contada en ‘Vineland’ parece sencilla a priori. En el año 1984, en Vineland, Zoyd, imagen del típico hippie de los 60-70, y miembro de un grupo musical de lo más cutre, vive como puede realizando todo tipo de trabajos, pero sobre todo de los cheques que cobra del gobierno por incapacidad mental. Y es que entre las actividades de Zoyd, se encuentra la de atravesar las ventanas de todo tipo de negocios. Prairie, la hija de Zoyd, es una joven que fue abandonada por su madre cuando era un bebé, así que le toca vivir con su excéntrico padre, hasta que un día decide salir en busca de su madre. Por otro lado, Frenesí, la madre de Prairie, pertenecía a un grupo liberal, y se dedicaba a rodar películas con este trasfondo, siendo vigilados por ello por el FBI. Por si fuera poco, tenemos a LD, amiga de Frenesí, una americana que fue entrenada en el mundo ninja, escenas todas estás que, aunque anteriores en el tiempo, hacen pensar inevitablemente en las películas Kill Bill de Tarantino. Y también tenemos al malo de la novela, Brock Vond, un fiscal obsesionado con encontrar a Frenesí.

Todo esto, que contado así parece grotesco (ya se sabe lo difícil que es intentar contar de qué van las novelas de Pynchon), no es más que una burla, una caricatura de los años de Nixon, de los de Reagan, y de todo el movimiento hippie. Toda la novela está impregnada de referencias culturales, del cine, la televisión y la música.

‘Vineland’ no es de las novelas de Pynchon que más me han gustado, por ahora. Me quedo con su primera mitad y su humor socarrón y absurdo, porque la segunda mitad me parece demasiado alocada. Como siempre, me asombra la capacidad de Pynchon para dar explicación a diversos episodios que habías leído y que parecían una cosa cuando realmente eran otra bien distinta.

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.

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon is a novel set in California in 1984, with flashbacks to the 1960s and 1970s. It tells the story of several characters whose lives intersect against the backdrop of political upheaval in 20th-century America, with themes of family, fatherhood, the nature of history, and the consequences of past actions. The novel is known for its unique narrative style, complex web of interconnected storylines and characters and its commentary on American society, the nature of power and the way individuals respond to it through satire and irony. The book received mixed reviews on its release, some find it challenging to follow and heavy-handed on its satire, while others praise its complexity and thought-provoking commentary on politics and society.

2023 review:

ja kijk 8 jaar later moet ik bekennen dat hoewel JA het 'plot' is nog steeds vaag en JA af en toe is pynchon onuitstaanbaar maar also JA het is vermakelijk en soms grappig en NEE sincerity did not die an ironic death dus JA ik ervoer wel wat emotionele roerselen in de laatste paar pagina's dus ??? ben ik bekeerd ??? ben ik een pynchonoid ??? in this essay i will--

2015 review:

I've reread the first 50/60 pages and other bits for my essay, and as always (mostly) when I think longer about a novel I've read for uni, or I write an essay about it, the more I appreciate it.

As one of my teachers apparently uses to say, "Pynchon is better reread than read."

Damn.
3.5 stars it is then. Maybe, one day, I'll upgrade it to 4 stars.