cannot follow what is going on and I give up.

Me cuesta no mostrar una opinión entusiasta por obras como esta. Las veces que he leído a Pynchon (este y La subasta del lote 49) me ha parecido que es el autor que mejor refleja un relato vital coherente en un contexto histórico determinado y, al mismo tiempo, en cierta medida, desacredita a buena parte de creadores, incluso de renombre; vuelve falsas sus historias, las convierte en fábulas de un mundo demasiado complejo para llevarlas a una trama que se presenta, se anuda y se desenlaza.
Lo importante no parece ser el relato, por muy fantástico que sea, de los hechos acontecidos, ni dónde ni cuándo. Igual que cuando pensamos y vivimos, no solamente lo hacemos con nuestro presente, sino también con nuestro pasado, e incluso con nuestro futuro. Pynchon no defrauda, y sus personajes tampoco.
En un mundo habitado por residuos del hippismo, personajes como Zoyd deambulan por la vida arrastrando un pasado que le permite un sustento futuro; su hija Prairie busca en su madre la explicación de su propia vida; mientras su madre, Frenesí, que había vivido olvidando su pasado no puede dejar de sentir cierta nostalgia por los tiempos de la República Popular del Rock and Roll (PR3).
Alrededor, locos y locas. Tan locos y locas como los que nos encontramos día a día. Tan locos y locas como nosotros y nosotras. Seres desequilibrados tan reales como nosotros mismos: Héctor Zuñiga y su adicción televisiva, Brock Vond y el deseo personificado o LD, una ninja asesina.
Todo ello con dosis de humor a raudales y una banda sonora con el repertorio de los increibles Corvairs y de las Damas Vomitonas. De premio, la aparición como artista invitado de Wendell "Mucho" Maas, al que conocemos de La subasta del lote 49, en un cameo final.
Muy recomendable.

Vineland is downplayed by Pynchon fans and completely ignored by curious newbies, who tend to pass over it in favour either of the big-game status of one of his doorstop meganovels, or of the appealing slenderness of The Crying of Lot 49. Shame. All his gifts and his mysteries are on display here, wrapped up in one of his most enjoyable, inexplicable, and lushly all-enveloping plots. Rereading it now, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s terribly underrated.

The essential storyline, if there is one, concerns the quest of fourteen-year-old Prairie to find her long-lost mother Frenesi, a hippy-chick revolutionary turned government informer, who has left a string of lovesick boys and girls wherever she’s been. But around this kernel Pynchon deposits layer upon layer of sub-plots, super-plots, side-plots and inter-plots until you are wading thigh-deep through new characters, new locations, new sensations, on every page.

It reads chaotically, but the chaos is intricately plotted. Pynchon is doing twenty things at once in this book, and all of them brilliantly. Prairie’s story is set in the 1980s, but the key events in Frenesi’s life happened fifteen or twenty years before that – and what Vineland is really about is what happened to that generation. How the counterculture kids of the 1960s turned into the Reagan voters of the 1980s. In that sense it’s a political novel.

OK, a political novel, all right – but that doesn’t really explain the experience of this book, does it? Because along the way we have a psychic detective investigating a Godzilla attack, we have a UFO abduction during a passenger flight to Hawaii, we have a community of kunoichi, or female ninjas, in the Californian hills, a political prison deep in a nuclear fallout shelter, a Tokyo sex auction, a community of zombie-ghosts, and a potted history of mallrats. Often these incidents are slipped in obliquely, so that you put the book down blinking, as though coming up from hypnosis, thinking vaguely – did I really read that…? Did I get that impression from the words on the page, or was I imagining something on my own initiative? Pynchon is a master at palming ideas off unseen, adding more and more dependent clauses to his sentences, pushing the key information further and further down, so that it seeps in through a kind of osmosis and, though you understand what he’s talking about, you don’t quite recall being told.

This sense of fluidity is abetted by his extraordinary ability to slip-'n'-slide time and place when you least expect it, jumping in and out of different timezones without the usual formalities but without, also, any jarringly ‘experimental’ effects. Have a look at what happens during this conversation sometime in the 1970s, where Prairie’s dad Zoyd is talking to a friend about finding somewhere to stay near Frenesi’s family:

“On the one hand, you don’t want this turning into your mother-in-law’s trip, on the other hand, they might know about someplace to crash, if so don’t forget your old pal, a garage, a woodshed, a outhouse, don’t matter, ’s just me and Chloe.”

“Chloe your dog? Oh yeah, you brought her up?”

“Think she’s pregnant. Don’t know if it happened here or down south.” But they all turned out to look like their mother, and each then went on to begin a dynasty in Vineland, from among one of whose litters, picked out for the gleam in his eye, was to come Zoyd and Prairie’s dog, Desmond. By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was starting to put together a full day’s work…

Whoa, whoa, whoa, did you catch that? We just panned down to the dog for half a sentence, and before you know it we’ve followed two generations of puppies all the way through a quick ten years, so that Pynchon can now sleight-of-hand straight into a conversation in the '80s without having to do any ponderous throat-clearing of the ‘Several years later…’ variety. He pulls this shit on every page and he is GOOD at it. Most of them you won’t even notice.

Pynchon’s women, as always, are cool and concupiscent, but the horniness is balanced here – uniquely in his oeuvre – by having a wry female protagonist who is never sexualised. Prairie is unflappable, observant, the writing never patronises her – she’s one of the great teenage girls in fiction.

Frenesi, by contrast, is the archetypal Pynchonic femme fatale, replaying the author’s usual paranoid sexual fantasy of how nice girls just can’t resist the manly charms of the Asshole King, who goes here by the name of Brock Vond, a federal neofascist who’s eagerly prosecuting the Republicans’ War on Drugs. A lot of people who discuss Vineland find Frenesi’s motivation implausible – would she really throw everything away, her politics, her principles, her daughter, just because she can’t stop fucking this guy? And is Pynchon really going to hinge his entire Heath Robinson plot on such a flimsy velleity?

Yeah, he is, and the book doesn’t get enough credit for playing such a calculated move. ‘I’m not some pure creature,’ Frenesi agonises at one point, during a painful imagined break-up with a girlfriend who put her on the usual pedestal – ‘you know what happens when my pussy’s runnin' the show…’ It’s a dynamic played out in almost all his books, but the collateral resonances are nowhere made more obvious, the D/S overtones in her submission to Brock prefiguring something essential about what happened to her whole generation:

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it.

There’s the whole novel in a sentence. Does Pynchon believe it? Say rather that it’s his secret fear. That’s why it’s necessary for it to play out on the interpersonal level too, which pretty soon, given his characters, comes round to some kind of Sylvia Plathlike every-woman-adores-a-fascist deal.

Vineland is infused with a genuine, unfashionable nostalgia for the acid dreams of the Sixties, but a nostalgia tempered by the resolve to assess the roots of its failures as time went by and ‘revolution went blending into commerce’. Against these incursions all he can offer are the tried and tested defences of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scablands garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

You can sink into this book and swim in it, and the pages will close up over your head. It’s just beautifully made – hilarious and sexy and sad and constantly provocative. And it has more to say about what the 1980s were really about than any number of Brett Easton Ellis or Martin Amis or Jonathan Coe novels can manage. Perhaps it’s not objectively his best book, but it is, for my money, his most fun.

Thomas Pynchon ormai è saldamente collocato nel mio personale Olimpo degli scrittori. Adoro il suo stile, il suo incrociare i piani narrativi e i punti di vista della moltitudine dei personaggi, il suo sguardo tagliente e ironico che mira a scoprire il velo dorato e ipocrita della società e dei suoi ingranaggi. Così rimango incantata dal suo far cantare il flusso di coscienza della Storia, intessendo immagini auliche ad altre decisamente realistiche, grazie anche ad un sapiente intreccio di differenti registri linguistici.
Questo romanzo non è da meno, l’autore scava sotto la facciata altisonante di quella che era stata l’età della contestazione, mette sottilmente in luce le contraddizioni e il vuoto di valori che avrebbero profondamente contraddistinto l’epoca successiva, quella pop iconizzata da Warhol, quella dominata dalla divinità dei mass media e della televisione, quella dalla patina perfetta e sorridente che nascondeva il suo vero volto e le sue incoerenze.

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.

Estamos quizás ante una de las novelas con menos predicamento dentro de la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon. No tiene la brevedad y encanto La subasta del lote 49 ni el prestigio de sus grandes tochos. En verdad se trata de una narración que sirve de conglomerado de diferentes signos y temas de la contracultura, aunque vistos desde finales de los 80, con todo el aire de desencanto y derrota que ello conlleva. En ese panorama la influencia de la televisión goza de una prevalencia capital.

Y se oía a otros abuelos discutir la perenne cuestión de si los Estados Unidos flotaban aún en un crepúsculo prefascista o si esa oscuridad había caído hacía muchos y estúpidos años y la luz que creían ver procedía únicamente de millones de teles mostrando todas ellas las mismas sombras de brillantes colores. página 350

El problema de vuestra generación -opinó Isaías-, sin ánimo de ofender, es que creíais en vuestra Revolución, que le consagrasteis vuestras vidas... pero desde luego no entendíais gran cosa de la tele. En el momento mismo en el que la tele os enganchó se acabó lo que se daba, toda esa América alternativa, igual que los indios, lo vendisteis todo a vuestros verdaderos enemigos, y encima en dólares de 1970, demasiado barato... página 351


David Foster Wallace por lo visto deploraba de esta novela, juicio a mi parecer exagerado y precipitado, pues sin duda tiene nivel. Su principal "fallo" es que su complicación no es tan desorbitada como en El arcoiris de gravedad y eso por lo visto disgusta a los esnobs más petulantes. No les complace porque no luce demasiado presumir de haber comprendido un texto menos impenetrable y razonablemente accesible. Pero es una novela de Thomas Pynchon, por lo tanto no es un bocado blando y ligero. Tiene toda esa prosa alambicada de Pynchon (en ocasiones demasiado), también muchos saltos temporales y en el punto de vista. En vez de esas fantasías paranoides de títulos anteriores encontramos una mezcla de mitos y leyendas entretejidos en tramas políticas muy detalladas y aventuras de drogadictos, también desliza, muy de vez en cuando, sueños que insuflan cierta elevación etérea y se une al habitual contraste de Pynchon entre lo muy docto con lo muy grosero, el cultismo con el comentario sobre tetas.

La verdad es que a pesar de sus cualidades, a pesar que tiene momentos maravillosos (sobre todo en el tramo final) y otros muy divertidos (como ese pasaje dónde Brock Vond cree que se le girará el cerebro por culpa de un ataque de risa incontrolada) a veces se me ha hecho demasiado embrollada, con unas cuantas escenas muy dialogadas y de poco fuste, también algunos pasajes poco gratificantes. El balance final es positivo pero no entusiasta. Yo recomendaría no perdértela ni pasarla por alto si te interesa la contracultura norteamericana o simplemente has disfrutado de Pynchon anteriormente. No le hagas caso a David Foster Wallace, que como prescriptor cultural / crítico no se habría ganado la vida ni en broma.


Y cómo nota curiosa, cabe comentar que en la película que a estas horas está acabando de montar Paul Thomas Anderson (que toma como inspiración esta novela) uno de los papeles, de supremacista blanco, un trasunto del Brock Vond de este Vineland, ha recaído en Sean Penn, quien es mencionado dentro de la novela.

Reread...I usually don't mark rereads, but this I had to. I first read it last year and rated it 3 stars. I could't remember much from it, and Pynchon always deserves a second go...and boy am I glad I did. This read was easily one the best experiences I've had reading. I'm in lockdown and this just took me out of it...it's a fucking blast and pure genius.

Yes, perhaps my favourite book of all time, cos like Charles Dickens's Hard Times, it embodies an entire structure of feeling (industrial England/post-Fordist-post-1968 America respectively) and makes you laugh and feel while also making you doubt and think. Unlike Hard Times (which I nevertheless love to bits), it doesn't lecture at you re: precisely what to attitudes to adopt about any of that (OK, other than that whole Nixon-Reagan axis of meanness angle). Rather it bestrews all kinds of juicy little historical nuggets along your readerly path, and if it has any univocal message about any of that, it is simply (not at all merely) in the spirit of, as world-weary DL sez, "Look it up, check it out."

Wrote about the book here and there...

2023: Rereads bring out a lot of magic missed the first journey through.

2019:

And everyone lived happily ever after....


Not my favorite Pynchon, but was much better than what I was expecting. There was a lot of funny shit in this one. One of my favorite funnies, Pee-Wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story.

Non ho dato 5 stelle perché sebbene sia un ottimo romanzo non è al pari di vette assolute come V e l'arcobaleno della gravità... Ma ripeto pure un Pynchon minore è maggiore di gran parte della letteratura odierna

"...everybody's a hero at least once, maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."
- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland



I first read Vineland about 25+ years. It was my sophomore year in college. I was idealistic and I met this guy in the college bookstore named Thomas Pynchon. Since it was my FIRST (or was The Crying of Lot 49 my first?) Pynchon, I think I missed way more than I gained (except for the desire for MORE Pynchon). Looking back now, Pynchon for me starts to divide into his BIG GREAT novels and his funny, shorter novels.

In my brain, Vineland fits with Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, V., and The Crying of Lot 49. On the otherside of my Pynchon index card sits Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. Obviously, there are no perfect systems here. But that is how Vineland sits for me. It was VERY good, just not GENIUS Pynchon. The slimmer, more linear, suffer/pot noir stuff seems more likely to be finished and read. But his bigger, Maximalist, juggernauts are waves that if you can catch and ride, will float you to Nirvana. The bigger the Pynchon risk, the better your chance for seeing God (or at least splitting a sub with her).

Vineland basically tells the story of how the hippies of the 60s sold out (in various ways) and moved from rejecting Nixon in the 60s to embracing Reagan in the 80s. Like most of Pynchon's novels, this one is filled to overflow with Pynchon's humor, caricatured characters with absurd names, pop culture, paranoia, and weed. I enjoyed it and if I was going to rank it against most writers it would rank high. But it is on the lower end of the Pynchon heap.

(Updated review)

When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?

What happened to the hippies? That's (probably?) the central question that the book is asking. The sad answer is that the hippie movement did not simply die at the start of the 1970s as popular history would have us believe, but died a thousand times over thanks to operations by the U.S government lasting well into the 1980s. Instead of the crackdowns waged against campus movements in the 1960s a new strategy emerges. Destroy from the inside.

By the end of the book most characters have in one way or another become informants for the FBI. Why did this happen? Who stood to gain? Some characters believe that it is all about the state consolidating power for itself. But the corruptive tentacles of power are not so easily classified. The book is most prescient in this passage where the former revolutionary Weed Atman (who is also dead?) begins to reflect on who is to blame for his murder.

(I) Used to think I was climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution- first Rex (other revolutionaries), above him your mother (the informants), then Brock Vond (the FBI), then- but that’s when it begins to go dark, and that door at the top I thought I saw isn’t there anymore, because the light behind it just went off too.

There are systems at work beyond anyone's control or ability to understand. There was no malice in Weed's assassination. It was a necessity for the protraction of the powers-that-be. Is it the invisible hand at work?

I noted in a recent review that I couldn't appreciate a good run-on sentence anymore. That seems to have been a lie. Pynchon has some incredible run-on sentences.

Trees. Zoyd must have dozed off. He woke to rain coming down in sheets, the smell of redwood trees in the rain through the open bus windows, tunnels of unbelievably tall straight red trees whose tops could not be seen pressing in to either side. . . . 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.

Highly recommended.