Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon
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Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert show more Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.). show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Given that there are books I read last year whose plots are a total blank in my memory, it's not surprising that all I could recall of my 2008 reading of Vineland was Zoyd's autotransfenestrations in exchange for government cheese, and some nonsense about ninjas and Godzilla and UFO's. Turns out, the book's as clear a statement of Pynchon's politics and preoccupying themes as you'll find in his oeuvre. It comes down to "the long, sad, history of L.A. land use", to quote Vineland's cousin-German Inherent Vice - but not just L.A., and not just actual, literal land use. It's about the usurpation of dreams by reality, the overwriting, gradually or all-at-once, of liberty by discipline and power; it's about the shutting down of that show more "parenthesis of light" (IV again) that was the 60's, and in the 1984-set Vineland we also get the throughline from Nixon to Reagan, how despite their surface differences they were both manifestations of the same cryptofascist American instinct. It's all here in this intro to the Fumimota office, which:
You see this "two worlds" motif in all TP's books, but there's always at least a sliver of hope, of doubt that the World of Reality really is destined to prevail (that sneaky "it was thought"). Here's the duality even more in-your-face, as Hippie nemesis Brock Vond (whose name is second in villain-vibes only to Against the Day’s Scarsdale Vibe) cajoles Frenesi into introducing into her underground film collective the weapon that will kill countercultural figurehead Weed Atman. Frenesi protests, "I can't bring a gun in the house." And Vond, object of her degrading lust for authority, tells her:
"So either I pussy out or become a courier of death, wow, this is some swell choice you're giving me" complains Frenesi, but she chooses the latter.
Frenesi (descended from the anarchist Traverses in Against the Day) is one of Pynchon's most interesting characters, even though for most of the book she's in the background or on the periphery. "Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it." In Pynchon, political power games always have a sexual analogue, and vice versa. Frenesi blames her Vond-induced betrayals on "my pussy runnin' the show", a bit like what Cyprian Latewood in Against the Day succumbs to with the Nazi Theign. Both Frenesi and Cyprian are drawn to fascist authority figures out of some kind of suppressed nostalgia, or "unacknowledged desire" maybe not so much for order as for clarity. They're Pynchon's answer, I think, to the question of why the Preterite always end up stomped or manipulated into self-stymying by the Elect. Of course it might just be a case of assholes being assholes, as ultra-badass DL tells her sister in cinema Ditzah:
Yet another question as relevant now in 2025 as ever. But I'm not some kind of weirdo who reads Pynchon for psychosexual power-political insights, or even, really, for the abrupt intrusions into his narratives of the fantastical, the Godzilla footprint in the "World of Reality". I'm the kind of weirdo who reads TP primarily for the "check's in the mayo" joke, for the glorious coinage "octogenarihexation" meaning the act of being 86'd (which appears by the way on page 186), for the "Noir Mall" which is one extended pun:
and more than anything, for sentences like this that seem to redeem through poetry alone the "broken world":
...was located in a basic L.A. business/shopping complex of high-rises that stood on a piece of former movie-studio lot. Space devoted to make-believe had, it was thought, been reclaimed by the serious activities of the World of Reality. A lot of old-time oaters had been lensed here - she'd watched some, Saturday mornings on the Tube - but where stagecoaches had rolled and posses thundered, now stockbrokers whispered romantically about issues and futures into tiny telephone mikes no bigger than M&M's, crowds dressed to impress came and shopped and sat on tile patios eating lunch, deals were made high overhead in legal offices that weren't always legal, sharing these altitudes with city falcons who hunted pigeons in the booming prisms of sun and shadow below.
You see this "two worlds" motif in all TP's books, but there's always at least a sliver of hope, of doubt that the World of Reality really is destined to prevail (that sneaky "it was thought"). Here's the duality even more in-your-face, as Hippie nemesis Brock Vond (whose name is second in villain-vibes only to Against the Day’s Scarsdale Vibe) cajoles Frenesi into introducing into her underground film collective the weapon that will kill countercultural figurehead Weed Atman. Frenesi protests, "I can't bring a gun in the house." And Vond, object of her degrading lust for authority, tells her:
But you can bring a camera. Can't you see, the two separate worlds - one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real? What if this is some branch point in your life, where you'll have to choose between worlds?
"So either I pussy out or become a courier of death, wow, this is some swell choice you're giving me" complains Frenesi, but she chooses the latter.
Frenesi (descended from the anarchist Traverses in Against the Day) is one of Pynchon's most interesting characters, even though for most of the book she's in the background or on the periphery. "Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it." In Pynchon, political power games always have a sexual analogue, and vice versa. Frenesi blames her Vond-induced betrayals on "my pussy runnin' the show", a bit like what Cyprian Latewood in Against the Day succumbs to with the Nazi Theign. Both Frenesi and Cyprian are drawn to fascist authority figures out of some kind of suppressed nostalgia, or "unacknowledged desire" maybe not so much for order as for clarity. They're Pynchon's answer, I think, to the question of why the Preterite always end up stomped or manipulated into self-stymying by the Elect. Of course it might just be a case of assholes being assholes, as ultra-badass DL tells her sister in cinema Ditzah:
Ditzah: 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.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?
DL: You always did look at things more historically. What I just figure is is he's a mean mother fucker, that's a technical term, and a lot of these MMF's as we call 'em tend to be spoilers which if there's somethin' they can't have, or they know they've already lost, why, they'll just go try and destroy as much as they can anyway, till it's over.
Yet another question as relevant now in 2025 as ever. But I'm not some kind of weirdo who reads Pynchon for psychosexual power-political insights, or even, really, for the abrupt intrusions into his narratives of the fantastical, the Godzilla footprint in the "World of Reality". I'm the kind of weirdo who reads TP primarily for the "check's in the mayo" joke, for the glorious coinage "octogenarihexation" meaning the act of being 86'd (which appears by the way on page 186), for the "Noir Mall" which is one extended pun:
Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n' the Lox.
and more than anything, for sentences like this that seem to redeem through poetry alone the "broken world":
So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.show less
I've not read Pynchon before. There's a hint of James Joyce in how he can blow up every simple character introduction into pages of detailed backstory. At first this seems like it's going to be Zoyd's story, something about how his long history of trouble with the law is finally catching up with him but at heart he's really an okay guy. Then it seems to be centered on some mystery to do with his ex-wife Frenesi, instead. Or maybe it's about their daughter Prairie, sitting at the centre of it all? But there is never anyone who remains at the centre of it all because the centre keeps moving. The novel reinvents itself into becoming centered upon whichever character is being introduced next. It's only when the blanks have been filled in show more and Zoyd's story appears to be coming full circle, in tandem with Frenesi's and Prairie's, that a picture starts to form just before it dissolves.
Strange little memorable bits pop up among the many stories within the story. There is a colony of ninjas in the woods, the impress of a giant sea monster's foot on a crushed laboratory, a sneaky murderous touch that takes a full year to kill, a lot of people becoming curiously addicted to television, etc. One recurring theme is government secrecy and oppression. No one can escape the machinations of the American government and its agencies, who literally get away with murder and have plots within plots for how to control the population. Pynchon's 1990 fantasy version of this paranoia seems so innocent now.
I'm a little taken aback that Pynchon fans lament this novel is too coherent, but I think I need to sample more before I can arrive at any personal feeling about his work. So far I'm just bewildered and bemused. show less
Strange little memorable bits pop up among the many stories within the story. There is a colony of ninjas in the woods, the impress of a giant sea monster's foot on a crushed laboratory, a sneaky murderous touch that takes a full year to kill, a lot of people becoming curiously addicted to television, etc. One recurring theme is government secrecy and oppression. No one can escape the machinations of the American government and its agencies, who literally get away with murder and have plots within plots for how to control the population. Pynchon's 1990 fantasy version of this paranoia seems so innocent now.
I'm a little taken aback that Pynchon fans lament this novel is too coherent, but I think I need to sample more before I can arrive at any personal feeling about his work. So far I'm just bewildered and bemused. show less
My first Pynchon! I feel like he is so influential to so many other books I'm reading or want to read, that it was time to actually tackle one of his books. This one sounded like... the most accessible? Honestly, I was not expecting something along the lines like Douglas Adams and Dirk Gently. This narrative is like a gonzo, spastic, mess of tangents in the best way. Which is exactly how I might describe Adams. Each character gets led to another character, sometimes using the form of technology to lead them around. Like Prairie learning about her mom through video she took. In general, just a circus of randomness inspired by the 60s and the 80s in California. I will say, 99% of the pop-culture references in this book are the most show more lasting references that Pynchon could have chosen, especially if you consider this book was written 34 years ago. Is he pop-culturally psychic? I think I might be, which is why I was surprised Pynchon didn't win the Nobel Prize this year... Sidenote that it was reminding me of the film 'The Long Goodbye' which I thought was only because it was a GREAT movie that has been haunting me since I watched it a few months ago. BUT NO. Pynchon names the movie in the book as a pun. If I hadn't been thinking about the movie, I wouldn't even have noticed the pun. I love being readerly justified once in a while. Also, this particular cover is one of my favorite book covers. It reminds me of something Vik Muniz might create.
*Book #137 I have read from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list show less
*Book #137 I have read from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list show less
First, there were the beat poets. Then there was Kurt Vonnegut. And somewhere in the middle of them stands Thomas Pynchon. I don't think Vineland is as difficult to read as many people think it is. The real trick is that you have to read it FAST--and I don't mean you have to finish the book quickly. Read it for fifteen minutes a day if you want to, but for those fifteen minutes, just keep going with total concentration. Don't bother trying to find the subject of the sentence you just finished (it's somewhere a couple of paragraphs back anyway). And if you catch yourself saying, "Wait, I missed something. That didn't make sense," don't worry. You didn't miss anything. It really didn't make sense--not yet anyway. Pynchon is on a show more surf-board in drug-infested waters. You either have to ride the surfboard with him or get out of the water. Like the beat poets, Pynchon in Vineland is dark and angry and gleeful and absurd all at the same time--an approach that suits his subject matter (the cultivation and handling of snitches from the crushing of the 60's revolution through the war on drugs of the 80's) perfectly. If you don't like the beat poets and you don't like Kurt Vonnegut, don't bother with Vineland. It will probably just frustrate you. Personally, while I certainly didn't find the book life-changing, I found it bold, challenging, and completely unique--which earns it respect if not love. show less
At a time when we are assessing how short lived the ‘victories’ in our history books were, while seeing progressivism undone by the steady drumbeat of the anti-government movement, and civil rights and voting rights undone by a steady drumbeat projecting citizens as enemies – it’s a good time to dive back into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland where the true believers of 60s counter culture find themselves scattered in rural enclaves of Northern California – coming to terms with betrayal, guilt and distrust.
American History is always the unnamed character in a Pynchon story and its antagonist always seems to be the mythology of American History. The mythology is a story of progress and hope, standing up to authority – while the show more situation the characters find themselves – the protests against the war, Nixon, COINTELPRO – have their roots in the Red Scare, attempts to root communist sympathizers out of Hollywood and colleges, the Cold War and rise of the military industrial complex, Anslinger’s racist early version of the War on Drugs – all seeming to have stacked the deck against idealism. And a repression that seemed to be defeated with the resignation of Nixon, merely going underground.
And while society seems to fail against infringements against the 1st and 2nd Amendments the powers that be seem to be taking liberties with the 4th Amendment.
This is where the central characters – Zoyd Wheeler a washed-up hippy having his home seized by the DOJ, his wife (for a brief time) Frenesi having her body and existence seized by an obsessive Fed and their child, friends and family seemingly caught in the crossfire – find themselves. And where the central villain, Brock Vond – whose motivations seem to change from a twisted view of love for Frenesi, to a love of power, to a sheer Iago-level evil desire to win at all costs – attacks, seizing even those things that romantics would think can’t be taken.
There are the fantastic details that lead the reader down every conspiracy-laden rabbit hole – a commune of female ninja warriors, a Godzilla size foot stomp that takes out a factory to serve as an inciting incident, a psychological and theological impact of television, and a for-profit college designed to indoctrinate (ok the last two – not so unreal) that are great Pynchon hallmarks that stretch not only the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief but also the citizen’s.
The book ends with perhaps one of Pynchon’s most sentimental endings, the daughter of the revolutionaries – Prairie waking up in nature, the lost family dog with her – the two who may actually be innocent with their future’s threatened the most by repressive regimes finding themselves in an Edenic place. Then the reader realizes the book is set in 1984, the time shared by Orwell – and perhaps Pynchon has not gone soft.
Vineland is one of the more underrated novels of its time and one that’s turned out to be uncomfortably prophetic. show less
American History is always the unnamed character in a Pynchon story and its antagonist always seems to be the mythology of American History. The mythology is a story of progress and hope, standing up to authority – while the show more situation the characters find themselves – the protests against the war, Nixon, COINTELPRO – have their roots in the Red Scare, attempts to root communist sympathizers out of Hollywood and colleges, the Cold War and rise of the military industrial complex, Anslinger’s racist early version of the War on Drugs – all seeming to have stacked the deck against idealism. And a repression that seemed to be defeated with the resignation of Nixon, merely going underground.
And while society seems to fail against infringements against the 1st and 2nd Amendments the powers that be seem to be taking liberties with the 4th Amendment.
This is where the central characters – Zoyd Wheeler a washed-up hippy having his home seized by the DOJ, his wife (for a brief time) Frenesi having her body and existence seized by an obsessive Fed and their child, friends and family seemingly caught in the crossfire – find themselves. And where the central villain, Brock Vond – whose motivations seem to change from a twisted view of love for Frenesi, to a love of power, to a sheer Iago-level evil desire to win at all costs – attacks, seizing even those things that romantics would think can’t be taken.
There are the fantastic details that lead the reader down every conspiracy-laden rabbit hole – a commune of female ninja warriors, a Godzilla size foot stomp that takes out a factory to serve as an inciting incident, a psychological and theological impact of television, and a for-profit college designed to indoctrinate (ok the last two – not so unreal) that are great Pynchon hallmarks that stretch not only the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief but also the citizen’s.
The book ends with perhaps one of Pynchon’s most sentimental endings, the daughter of the revolutionaries – Prairie waking up in nature, the lost family dog with her – the two who may actually be innocent with their future’s threatened the most by repressive regimes finding themselves in an Edenic place. Then the reader realizes the book is set in 1984, the time shared by Orwell – and perhaps Pynchon has not gone soft.
Vineland is one of the more underrated novels of its time and one that’s turned out to be uncomfortably prophetic. show less
Parts of this dreamy book come back to me at the strangest times. The paranoia of the Nixon era wafts from the story like pot smoke. Somehow there is enough room to slip in blond amazon ninjas and mysterious japanese sea creatures in with a thoughtful layering of parallel histories.
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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
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Author Information
31+ Works 51,225 Members
Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York on May 8, 1937. In 1959 he graduated with a B.A. in English from Cornell, where he had taken Vladimir Nabokov's famous course in modern literature after studying engineering physics and serving in the U.S. Navy for two years. He worked as a technical writer at Boeing for two and a half years. Pynchon show more won the Faulkner First Novel Award for V. in 1963, and in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), again his symbolism and commentary on the United States and human isolation have been praised as intricate and masterly, though some reviewers found it to be maddeningly dense. With this book Pynchon won the Rosenthal Foundation Award. Gravity's Rainbow, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974, is in part a fictional elegy and meditation on death and an encyclopedic work that jumps through time. Pynchon has also written numerous essays, reviews, and introductions, plus the fictional works Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Inherent Vice. His title Bleeding Edge made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2013. He is famous for his reclusive nature, although he has made several animated appearances on The Simpsons television series. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Vineland
- Original title
- Vineland
- Original publication date
- 1990
- People/Characters
- Zoyd Wheeler; Brock Vond; Ralph Wayvone; Frenesi Gates; Takeshi Fumimota; Weed Atman (show all 10); Prairie Wheeler; Hector Zuñiga; Van Meter; Sasha Gates
- Important places
- California, USA
- Related movies
- One Battle After Another (2025 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- Every dog has his day,
and a good dog
just might have two days.
—Johnny Copeland - Dedication
- For my mother and father
- First words
- Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof.
- Quotations
- Downtown, in the Greyhound station, Zoyd put Prairie on top of a pinball machine with a psychedelic motif, called Hip Trip, and was able to keep winning free games till the Vineland bus got in from L.A. This baby was a great ... (show all)fan of the game, liked to lie face down on the glass, kick her feet, and squeal at the full sensuous effect, especially when bumpers got into prolonged cycling or when her father got manic with the flippers, plus the gongs and lights and colors always going off. "Enjoy it while you can," he muttered at his innocent child, "while you're light enough for that glass to support you."
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It was Desmond, none other, the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe, roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.
- Blurbers
- McConnell, Frank
- Original language*
- Engels
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- ISBNs
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- ASINs
- 16