Vineland is Pynchon somewhere between the grandiose chaos of Gravity's Rainbow and the loopiness of Inherent Vice. The connection is Gordita Beach, where Doc Sportello himself probably caught a few gigs of The Corvairs with Shasta Fay at his side. Mucho Maas from The Crying of Lot 49 makes a cameo as well. I think that V. had a guy jumping through plate-glass window for kicks but I can't be sure. I can't be sure of anything anymore...

There is a lot in Vineland to admire. The plot is Pynchonesque, obviously, but never too hard to follow. There are dense slabs of prose that mine the craziness and contradictions of America and freedom and growing old and love and loss and dreams. There are puns and songs and movies and TV, and there is warmth and soul throughout. I'd recommend it.

A longer review and synopsis, of sorts, can be found at my blog The Ringer Files if you're inclined to check it out.

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…

If Three Should Be Five

I first read “Vineland” some time in the 90’s. Based on an imperfect recollection of it, I rated it three stars when I joined GoodReads. I’ve raised my rating to five stars, partly because of how much fun I had reading it a second time.

I can’t think of a better novel to read between now and when we emerge safely into the Post-Trump era.

Reprise and Foreshadow

“Vineland” reprises the longing and quest for an absent woman that was at the heart of n  “V”n (in this case, the daughter of left-wing activist parents, a “third generation lefty”, student radical, film-maker and the novel’s heroine, Frenesi Gates); it features Kommandant Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer and subsequently useful American citizen (who could have emigrated from n  “Gravity’s Rainbow”);n while it foreshadows the focus on the underground and anarchism that was so fundamental to n  “Against the Day”.n More realist than Pynchon’s previous three novels, its description of the American landscape is as detailed and expressive, usually as humorous and sometimes as sentimental as it would later be in n  “Mason & Dixon”:n

“The shape of the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them, repeated on its own scale the greater curve between San Diego and Terminal Island, including a military reservation which, like Camp Pendleton in the world at large, extended from the ocean up into a desert hinterland…”

"They were in a penthouse suite high over Amarillo, up in the eternal wind, with the sun just set into otherworld transparencies of yellow and ultraviolet, and other neon-sign colours coming on across the boundless twilit high plain…(381)"

“A lightning storm had appeared far out at sea and now, behind them out the window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along the horizon. Somewhere in here a stereo began to play a stack of albums from the fifties, all in that sweet intense mainstream wherein the tenor drowns of love, or, as it is known elsewhere, male adolescence.”

“Zoyd, who was driving, came at last upon a long forest-lined grade and cresting saw the trees fold away, as there below, swung dizzily into view, came Vineland, all the geometry of the bay neutrally filtered under pre-storm clouds, the crystalline openwork arcs of pale bridges, a tall power plant stack whose plume blew straight north, meaning rain on the way, a jet in the sky ascending from Vineland International south of town, the Corps of Engineers marina, with salmon boats, power cruisers, and day sailers all docked together, and spilling uphill from the shoreline a couple of square miles crowded with wood Victorian houses, Quonset sheds, postwar prefab ranch and split-level units, little trailer parks, lumber-baron floridity, New Deal earnestness. And the federal building, jaggedly faceted, obsidian black, standing apart, inside a vast parking lot whose fences were topped with concertina wire. ‘Don’t know, it just landed one night, sitting there in the morning when everybody woke up, folks seem to be gettin’ used to it.’ (317)”

This sounds like somewhere that is really there and that you’re in the passenger’s seat of the car that Zoyd is driving and you can see it, too. Whilst laughing.

Reaganomic Drug Hysteria

Published in 1990, the novel is set partly in 1969 (in cinematic flashback), but primarily in 1984, the year in which Ronald Reagan won a second term as President. It was also a time when Reagan’s economic policies (dubbed “Reaganomics”) and his “War on Drugs” (which initiates what Pynchon calls “national drug hysteria”) were in full flight. Perhaps presciently for Trump, it’s worth noting that the assassination attempt on Reagan was made just 69 days into his first term in 1981. People must have known what they were going to get.

Ironically (or maybe not), the ultimate source of the drugs was the CIA:

“Verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the US Code hath decided to control. Get me?...Notice how cheap coke has been since ‘81?”

Leaning Across the Counter-culture

It’s well known that Pynchon has always had counter-cultural sympathies. Here, they’re front and centre, as is the associated politics. Frenesi conceives of her life working in the seventies underground documentary film industry this way:

“When the sixties were over, when the hemlines came down and the colours of the clothes went murky and everybody wore makeup that was supposed to look like you had no makeup on, when tatters and patches had had their day and the outlines of the Nixonian Repression were clear enough even for the most gaga of hippie optimists to see, it was then, facing into the deep autumnal wind of what was coming, that she thought, Here, finally - here’s my Woodstock, my golden age of rock and roll, my acid adventures, my Revolution. Come into my own at last...Here was a world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths…”

Student Film Collective

Frenesi belongs to a student film collective called 24fps, whose motto is:

“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed. Images put together are the substructure of an afterlife and a Judgment. We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!”



I Love a Man in Uniform

Paradoxically, Frenesi has inherited a “uniform fetish” from her mother, “as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control.” She enjoys a privileged personal and financial position, because after the death of agent Weed Atman at the College of the Surf protest, she’d been compromised by FBI agent, Brock Vond (“a rebel cop, with his own deeply personal agenda, only following the orders of a repressive regime based on death”) into supplying information and film footage about other activists for a fee (in his eyes, she had good “snitch potential”):

“He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs.”

“Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?”



From New Deal to No Deal

However, come Reagan’s autumnal wind, things started to change:

“She understood that the Reaganomic axe blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash [her husband] were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume...as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real axe, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final - but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin [their son] had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence...We are digits in God’s computer…”

They go from “once carefree dopers” to drug criminals sought out by paramilitary law-enforcement agencies like the crop-destroying Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP), Brock Vond’s Political Re-Education Program (PREP) and the Ultra High-Speed Urban Reconnaissance Unit (UHURU)(one of many “Star Trek” references). Pynchon paints a picture of the Reagan government as a brutal, conniving fascist regime that repealed the New Deal and replaced it with No Deal:

“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.’”

Reagan attacks the counter-cultural underground as if it were a vicious alien virus intent on destroying the American mainstream. The residents of Vineland become victims of Rex84 (an armed exercise to test the US military's ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest or national emergency.) Pynchon describes it as “big and invisible...silent, undocumented, forever deniable.”

The Nature of Resistance

Reagan is resisted by a coalition of forces, including dopers, bikers, students, unionists, “die hard industry lefties” in Hollywood, the Old Left, Wobblies, the New Left and Anarchists.

Guerillas turn skywriting and billboards that proclaim “Drug Free America” into “Drugs Free America”. Only, within a few years, they’re either dead or drinking Bud Light.

While I suspect that Pynchon is more sympathetic to Anarchism than I am, Frenesi comes from a family tradition that is more labour-oriented than focussed on the Identity Politics of the New Left and the Anarchist movement. Her parents have experienced HUAC inquiries, Hollywood black lists and strike-breaking. Their politics is more concerned with the plight of the working class under American capitalism than it is with more social and cultural issues. For the sake of convenience, I’ll call the former Hard Left Politics and the latter Soft Left Politics.

While the Soft Left continued its struggle into the 80’s, its effectiveness was undermined by Reagan's use of authoritarian force and the distribution of psychedelic drugs by the law enforcement agencies. Worse still, the Soft Left was placated, sedated and negated by the new drug of complacency and conformity, Television (the Tube). Pynchon seems to lament that the Soft Left became more prominent than the Hard Left. Despite his consistent identification with the counter-culture, he seems to regard its social and cultural concerns as introspective, self-obsessed and narcissistic.

To the extent that the New Left focuses on the status of the individual, it’s political program is individualistic in nature. In contrast, the Old Left focuses on the role of workers under Capitalism, and its political program is collectivist.


Tubular Blues

The Broken Collectivity

Either way, Reagan severely damaged the collective of resistance, so that Pynchon refers to it as “the broken collectivity”.

Blue-eyed Frenesi's reaction was to turn blue. She suffered postnatal depression after the birth of her daughter, Prairie, who joins the quest for her mother with her father, Zoyd Wheeler, and various federal agents (not just Brock Vond) who are obsessed with her. In a way, the quest to find Frenesi after she disappears ends up being a quest for the restoration of family, and arguably family order.

This is Pynchon at his most sentimental or empathetic (what he calls a "little wave of tenderness"). However, it also suggests an additional degree of scepticism about Anarchism. This is what he has to say about Brock Vond:

“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…They needed some reconditioning.”

Perhaps, the State doesn’t need to be abolished. It too might just need some reconditioning. Whether this reads too much into Pynchon’s work, I still think it can be questioned whether he equates the counterculture with Anarchism. It's arguable that an alternative culture of any significance requires a social democracy (a democratic family) within which to thrive. An anarchist society would be too full of unregulated and counterproductive individualism and conflict.

The Words of the Next Generation

Rightly or wrongly, Prairie's boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, blames the Tube for what went wrong:

"Whole problem ‘th you folks’ generation, nothin’ personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it - but you 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…"

February 26, 2017

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.

I've now read all of Pynchon's novels. I have Slow Learner: Early Stories heading my way from the library, and then there's nothing else left but to re-read them all again. Which I will probably do, over and over, for the rest of my life.

I'll admit that Vineland took me a minute to get into, but once I did, I really enjoyed the world spun up in its pages. It's obviously "minor" Pynchon, or "Pynchon-lite" as coined by Michiko Kakutani in her review of Bleeding Edge, but in some ways, that is a wonderful thing. The fact that Pynchon's range goes from erudite metaphors of entropy and the human death/sex drive to familial dramas ala TV soap operas is remarkable.

I don't really have a lot to add here other than to say that I do feel a pit of sadness not having another Pynchon work to look forward to—sure, I still have Slow Learner to churn through soon, but that doesn't really count. I hope the guy, turning 83 this year, has something cooking for us, ready to present soon. I need it. The country needs it.

I really hate the “Pynchon-lite” classification. Sure, the common gripe people have with this thing is that it’s not the mind-blowing encyclopedic trip we love from the guy, but he’s doing a different thing here.

Pynchon’s take on popular culture, family, and generational dynamics is just as brilliant as anything he’s ever done, and let’s face it, anything directly following GR (especially after such a long hiatus) was doomed in terms of critical reception. Not just for completists, this is one of Tommy’s best.

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.

Has anyone else ever employed such loopy, labyrinthine, lovely language to tell such weird and wackily written tales? I think not.

Wonderful as always from Tommy boy.

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D5iB...

Unjustly considered a happy-go-lucky slapstick comedy of a novel, Vineland is in fact quite dark and bitter in its potrait of what went wrong with the 60s. There's humor, sure, but lots of capital E Evil too. A novel of ideas more than character, more I think than any other Pynchon's, it might work well as a starting point for those looking to pop their Pynchon cherry, although I still believe Inherent Vice works better.

I can now officially say this is my new co-favorite novel.

"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.