«Watch the paranoia, please!»

This was my third go at trying to gradually voyage through Pynchon's oeuvre, having read Lot 49 and Inherent Vice before. Based on the immediate impression, Vineland is probably my least favorite of the three, but that's not to say there aren't countless diamonds hidden along the pages of this book. The story is set in Northern California in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan era, and is largely an elegy for the late 60s countercultural movement. We follow numerous characters that were involved in various ways with the events of that time, and we see how they are affected by the consequences and aftermath of that era, and we get numerous flashbacks to the turbulent events of their younger days.

There's a lot of trademark Pynchonian quirky humor and absurdity in here. At the same time, I also found it to harbor a rather pessimistic outlook on the failures of the 60s countercultural movement and a dark foreboding as to the authoritarian direction America was heading from Nixon through Reagan.

"[. . .] the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power."

But alongside this cynicism there's simultaneously an optimism that shines through, a hope that some of the pro-social undercurrents of the countercultural movement have survived on.

The book is shorter than most of Pynchon's work, but it's still deceptively dense, and his trademark fragmented style of seamlessly changing perspective mid-chapter is present. There's not really a single leading character, and we instead change between numerous people whose own backstories and sub-plots are expounded.

In my eyes, I do feel that Pynchon tackles many of the same themes of this book in a slightly more engaging way in Inherent Vice. But this is still a worthwhile read.

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.

I read this when it first came out and I have to say I enjoyed it even more the second time through!

Will write more later, but I will say, a good read to contrast with our new world of internet espionage.

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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

Far less intimidating than his great, overwrought Gravity's Rainbow, this 1990 novel presents a zany spoof satirical thriller on the surface, with an order of Harley-riding nuns, ninjettes, Reaganaught law enforcement agencies, 1960's radicals who have been driven underground or turned informants, and their mall-seeking children.

With his trademark humor and his prose (such maddening prose, veering from beautiful and lyrical to stunted and awful) he undertakes an ambitious critique of America's political character as it developed in the 1980's, critiquing the legacy of the 1960s' social unrest ("Who was saved?") and the use of expanded law enforcement privileges such as RICO to surveil and repress the citizenry. He shows an American people estranged from its progressive history by television and low-quality work. At one point, a program undertaken to 'turn' left-wingers and re-educate them for the state's purposes is closed down for being unnecessary.

In Vineland, a fictitious California forest area near Eureka, we fade on an ambiguously happy scene, a sort of haven from the police state where values appropriated by the right, such as family life and neighborhood, are lived affectionately.

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!

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.

Vineland is my publisher's favorite book so I'm actually contractually obligated to like it. And boy, let me tell you, it was great!! Helluva book, helluva book! True classic.

No, really, I just thought that first line would look good on twitter. You see, I have all my reviews set to automatically pop up on my feed and... Oh, the book, the book, right. I've come around pretty much all the way on Pynchon. I started with Against the Day, which is maybe a weird place to start, but one year I found a hardcover copy at the Shanty Days Book Sale, the most glorious day of the year in our little fishing town! The high point of Shanty Days weekend? Many will say the rip-roaring favorite-oldies-infused set by Spice on Saturday night; some swear by the line dance-a-palooza inspired by the Birminghams on Sunday afternoon... 'last big day drunk of the festival, boot-scootin' country flavor, best place to pick up a pretty, good-time lady!', many an old festival vet will say with a greasy wink in his eye. Some people like the parade (finger down throat, barfing gesture), some people like the fireworks, some folks say Shanty Days has never been the same since the Chicken on a Stick stand stopped showing up. What happened to them anyway? A whole novel could probably be written on what happened to the Chicken on a Stick man... a sad one probably... but yes, the cool kids know the book sale is where it's at! Um... anyway, I liked A the Day, but found parts of it annoying. I was left feeling... not entirely convinced. Next I read Gravity's Rainbow. I found that one to be pretty much 'the shit', as it were. All it's cracked up to be, mate.

Vineland here was quite a different animal, however. It's sprawling and crawling with paranoia and conspiracies... pretty stunning some of the parallels between Regan-era paranoia and Trump-era paranoia. You know, in that it's less paranoia and more the fact of crude, greedy, shameless pig-fuckers running the country. VOTED IN, by US to run OUR country. Kind of depressing... but I digress. What I'm driving at is that for all the wacky trippiness of action and deep state stuff Vineland is actually kind of understated. I'm starting to think that Pynchon maybe isn't all that complicit in his being touted as some kind of genius or meta fiction hero. Like the Cubs or the Red Sox or... well the Packers, it's the fans that are really the problem. Insufferable pricks a lot of them. Not my publisher, though. He's aces. If anyone would suggest that I implied otherwise, I would use my myriad connections in the shadier branches of the enforcement arm of our government or possibly the underworld to have them... redact such groundless slander. Permanently. Ya got me?

Vineland was a good book. That's for all those of you who sensibly skipped the preceding immense block of tripe which was surely churned out in some amphetamine fever. Trippy book man. Real groovy.

Abandoned at 50%. It started out interesting, but the author’s meandering writing became boring after awhile. It’s just not for me.

2024 Reread:

Once Pynchon had burnt the liquid oxygen propellant out of his system by way of a 770-page prose poem about "Money, Shit and the Word", all he was left to reckon with was the death rattle of a generation he held to be his peers, "countless lies about American freedom", and the choice of whether or not to let his readers continue to labour under the delusion that they were living in a "prefascist twilight".

Spoiler alert: they were not.

What was embedded in the perforated moiré of the Zone is made explicit under the Redwood trees of Vineland California, the highwater mark of Pynchon's skill as a novelist of character, time, and place. A novel so perfectly of and about the post-hippie dissolution and disillusion; a time when lighters that were once used to ignite cotton wicks plugged into wine bottles are now only serviceable in the lighting of one's cigarette outside their mobile home. No need to despair at what you've become though, there's still a community of counterculture failures to commiserate with. Join us down at the Friday night bonfire behind the Cucumber Lounge, where "iron speakers up on stripped fir poles crash alive with the national anthem." God, can you think of anything more American than that?

This novel - bowed under the weight of nearly two decades' worth of expectation - showcases Pynchon achieving a rare balance between the inconsequential, apolitical humanism of V, and the abstract, chemical alienation GRAVITY'S RAINBOW elicited in its less receptive readers (that is to say, those for whom it's abstractions failed to strike a connective chord). A precise balance of historical pain and recognition of responsibility, bound together with (it annoys me how trite this sounds) a deeply resonant familial love. It can be difficult to render any sense of clarity or finality on first past, as it's awash with his trademarked analepses and that trans-generational focalisation you'll recognise from the Big Red Rocket. One minute you're in a hotboxed panel van, and the next you're in a Guerilla film collective's cutting room a decade prior. You're not anchored to linear momentum the way conventional authors have conditioned you to be. Time and place notwithstanding, you're all fed the same narrative, and subject to the same asphyxiating judicial constrictions. They'll find a way to make that pill a little less bitter though; placate you with a few Mindless Pleasures.

"All the light they thought saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-coloured shadows."

God, I love this book. More to be said in the weeks to come. Keep that Tube glowin'.

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Vineland is a concise response to everyone who has criticised Pynchon for weak characterisation. Not without merit, mind you. In previous, more conceptually heavy works - Gravity's Rainbow being a brilliant but notorious offender - individual personae are sidelined, providing him with the latitude to flex his conceptual and thematic muscles. If you're a fan of the man's work, you know this is where he fires on all cylinders, operating as arguably the strongest prose stylist currently living. But the critical community have consistently remarked that his characters tend to skew cartoonish and highly stylised, stretching the boundaries of real, humanistic behaviour. Whether you subscribe to this opinion is another discussion altogether.

Enter Vineland, the second of TRP's ‘California Trilogy’, and often mischaracterised as "Pynchon Lite" (a flippant turn of phrase that will never cease to drive me bananas, pun intended). Those who gave it this unfortunate connotation in the first place are likely just the insufferable hoard of LitBros who resented their author being widely approachable for once, insecure that their status as "serious readers" might be threatened by a broader audience enjoying his work.

Here, TRP illustrates a generation in decline – the Countercultural movement of the late 60’s – as it passes from revolutionary social force into a quiet understated retirement. Vineland, a rural California community surrounded by towering redwood obelisks, is the hospice centre where these former revolutionaries come to accept the hand they’ve been dealt under Nixonian repression and swallow the bitter pill of incumbent Reaganomics. While a traditional protagonist is expectedly absent from the novel, what we’re presented with is a mosaic of lifelike characters, each positioned somewhere along the sliding scale of counterculture. Pynchon dilates in and out of each of their lives as they pass near, into, and through one another, creating a landscape portrait of the Hippie Generation. Yet in spite of this wide-angle view of society, no expense is spared when it comes to weaving texture into the personal histories of these people. I would argue that this is his most character focussed novel of the entire catalogue, particularly when it comes to establishing their individual motivations and ideological drives; an unexpected but delightful surprise.

The dust-jacket, one-liner reviews tend to forefront the “hilarity” and “humour” of this novel, a point of focus I simply do not understand. While the classic Pynchonian hijinks are absolutely present – it wouldn’t be one of his novels without them – this is the first of his works that I can comfortably characterise as a tragedy. He is, through and through, a countercultural icon, always siding with the Preterite over the Elect, preoccupied with the innumerate ways control systems find to subjugate them. While countercultural movements still exist today, they’re a fractured, crystalline set of tiny subcultures that share as little with one another as they do with the dominant social forces that repress them. Pynchon was forced to watch in real-time, as the outgroup he subscribed to was shattered in this way, and left to seek refuge in pocketed communities among the redwoods and low-rent beach flats. If reading Vineland you find yourself criticising it for ending on an open-ended note without resolution, I invite you to consider the possibility that this is exactly what he felt when writing it.

To boil it down to a soundbite, one-line thesis of my own (no easy task when it comes to Pynchon), Vineland is an examination of the price we pay for compromising our values for monetary reward, and the influences that drive us to make such fateful decisions in the first place. Despite other works of his careening themselves nose-down into literal oblivion (Now everybody!), I view this as the most melancholy of them all. An under-appreciated entry in the author's catalogue.

'...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.

First, the plot is ridiculous. Pynchon is one politically pissed-off and paranoid dude. The result is that characters act as they should not; indeed, could not. Plenty of reviewers have made the point, however, that one doesn't read Pynchon for the plot. Well, why read him?

Because the writing is brilliant. I didn't care how the story ended. After tangent after segue after tangent and another morphing tangent, who could care. You either drop Pynchon after 50 pages or you hang on for the ride. Paragraphs and dialogue are thrown against the wall, pyrotechnics like abstract art. I was reminded of Rushdie, who also uses history, pop culture and the glory of words in a tapestry that soars above the need to be realistic, analytical or true.