“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 you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity-‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.’ If the president can act like this why not —.” It appears Thomas Pynchon got it in 1984. This novel is in my Top Twenty All Time!
In following the tangled threads of political resistance, sexual desire and the integrity of personal codes of conduct in the lives of his charismatic characters from the 1960’s to 1984 when he wrote Vineland, Pynchon lays bare human interactions and motivations that are timeless. They are all too relevant.
Beyond his prescience, what vaults this book into my literary stratosphere are the many notes he strikes with elegant sureness and conviction. It is devastatingly funny, musically hip, light years ahead of its contemporary novels in its clear-eyed, natural respect of women and of other marginalized people, politically savvy, and historically deep and unsparingly researched. Some dangling quotes to lure you in:
“They are sarariman, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and feel only contempt for those who can.”
“his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking.”
“Everybody’s a squealer. We are in th’ Info Revolution here. Anytime you use a credit card you’re telling the man more than you meant to don’t matter if it’s big or small, he can use it all.” (Written in 1984?, Damn!)
“When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.” (Dick Cheney anyone?)
“To have said and done nothing is a great power,” Rex quoted Talleyrand, “but it should not be abused.”
“About the only thing’ll get a fascist through’s his charm. The news folks love it.” (I’m writing this review in 2020. Guess who I’m thinking of?)
And finally, one my kids might especially relate to, “He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father.”
Great writer, my favorite of his novels. Like rain in the desert.

best way i can think to describe this right now is like if lord of the rings was about the war on drugs

Reread 24.09.2018- 07.10.2018

I'm learning that Pynchon is only better the second time around. Against the Day next?

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So that's it for my third Pynchon. Coming down from a sort of high after reading Mason & Dixon about a month ago, I had pretty high expectiations going into this one.

Well, what's it all about? As usual Pynchon has a lot of sub-plots going on, characters disappearing and then coming back into the story again almost at random, and characters coming into the book but you never actually see them ever again. But in its essence it's about freedom, political repression, the tremendous failure that is the war on drugs and, as Salman Rushdie said, a look at what "America has been doing to its children, all these many years," and finally a sort of TV-is-bad-for-you-mmmkay-plot that runs throughout the book. For some reason I thought of this after finishing it...




(http://xkcd.com/1013/)

The whole thing is funny, oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny, and as the book progresses it gets more and more engaging; probably because at first you don't really understand what is going on, but it gets a little easier after a while. Pynchon has a knack for writing extremely beautiful paragraphs. I don't think I've ever read anyone who writes in a similar vein; it's really remarkable at times. Unfortunately I didn't take notes reading this so I don't have any quotes ready, but just take my word for it. Read it and see. It's not as brilliant as Mason & Dixon but hardly a failure of a book either. Very much Pynchon, and well worth reading!

A dystopian presentation, but with zombies and ninja magic, of Reagan's United States.

Follows a group of '60s new leftists and their antagonists, through use of translucent digressions, elliptical flashbacks, and abrupt changes of perspective, back and forth through several decades.

It might read as a mess at first, and therefore likely requires labor-intensive rereadings. That said, there're plenty of brilliant turns of phrase, descriptions, and scenes. Much comedy, satire, parody. Likely in the same genre as Mieville's Iron Council, even though it's not obvious if there's any direct influence.

The novel opens with a plot-related distinction between defenestration and transfenestration (15). For my second reading, I will assume that this is the basic structure of the presentation and be on the lookout accordingly.

Some interesting incidentals, illustrative rather than exhaustive, as it is pregnant writing:

We are told that a mobster's library included a copy of Delueze & Guatarri's Italian Wedding Cake Book (97), which is a slick little joke.

Ninja magic, should sound familiar: "She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit seppuku and think it was their idea - plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the Kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable Gojira no Chimpira" (127). In learning a "system of heresies about the human body" (128), our communist ninja also learns "the Vibrating Palm or Ninja Death Touch" (131). So, yeah, it's kickass. (There's also a way to undo the vibrating palm, as it happens.)

Engaged gender politics, such as the presentation of Sedgewick's homosociality thesis, as when the novel's obscure object of desire is told by her fascist lover that she is "the medium [leftist lover] and [fascist lover] use to communicate, that's all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places" (214). There's quite a bit of feminist erudition on display in this one.

We are reminded on numerous occasions, implicitly, of the "metaphor of movie camera as weapon" (197).

Nifty correspondence of cause with Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, wherein stalinism requires that "the Communists are 'men of iron will,' somehow excluded from the everyday cycle of ordinary human passions and weakness. It is as if they are 'the living dead', still alive but already excluded from the ordinary cycle of natural forces - as if, that is, they possess another body, the sublime body beyond the ordinary physical body" (Zizek 162-63). Similarly, Pynchon presents a leftist involved with "progressive abstinence, in which you began by giving up acid and pot, then tobacco, alcohol, sweets - you kept cutting down on sleep, doing with less, you broke up with lovers, avoided sex, after a while even gave up masturbating - as the enemy's attention grew more concetrated, you gave up your privacy, freedom of movement, access to money, with the looming promise always of jail and the final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain" (230). Add in the zombies, which are weird, possibly superfluous, and genuinely very polite, and it all comes together (or maybe not quite together, but rather not completely disentangled) as a riff on Slovene marxism.

Recommended for those who wish to at least appear more clitorally ladylike, male motorcyclists who for tax purposes reconstitute themselves as a group of nuns, and nomads in the sky's desert.