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Vineland

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 4,516 ratings · 278 reviews

A group of Americans in Northern California in 1984 are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times -- sexual and political -- which have refused to die. Among them is Zoyd Wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend) when an unwelcome face appears...more

Paperback, 480 pages

Published 1995 by Rowohlt Tb. (first published 1990)

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Apr 04, 2013 Bennet rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Bennet by: Vheissu

Shelves: brilliant-voices-and-language, novels-stories

Playlist added 4/4/2013

With this read I officially become a Pynchon fan. I have admired him for years but made it through only one other book, Inherent Vice, which I thoroughly enjoyed, enough to give it 5 stars. Vineland I just flat out love.

Story matters to me, and yes, there's a story here, a crazy-quilt kind of political, personal, cultural, criminal and fanciful bits that a couple of times almost lost me, but the language made all the difference, his way with words. A story is what makes t...more Playlist added 4/4/2013

With this read I officially become a Pynchon fan. I have admired him for years but made it through only one other book, Inherent Vice, which I thoroughly enjoyed, enough to give it 5 stars. Vineland I just flat out love.

Story matters to me, and yes, there's a story here, a crazy-quilt kind of political, personal, cultural, criminal and fanciful bits that a couple of times almost lost me, but the language made all the difference, his way with words. A story is what makes this a novel and not poetry, but the words kept me going, one after another and another, progressively enchanting me until I was spellbound. I've never doubted the man's literary genius, which until now has awed in fits and starts but never (except for Inherent Vice) sufficiently to keep me engaged throughout. Maybe this one being shorter has something to do with it, but there's a flow or a groove to the telling that proved irresistible, and once it kicked in I was blissfully along for the ride.

I marvel and wonder about how Pynchon writes. Inevitably I picture him sitting down to a typewriter, closing his eyes, reaching forth and typing like mad, not stopping until the book is done, as if tranced by some crazed but clear-eyed muse known only to him, who somehow makes art and craft of what in lesser hands would be just a mess. It feels like that's how he writes, and the reading strikes me as mainlining from his imagination to the page to my imagination in one brilliant rush of, well, words, glorious words. Let's jump in at random to show you what I mean.

. . . it had been his job for the past couple of weeks, nonetheless, trying, like everybody else, to get as much of the crop as possible out before Willis's big barbecue, too little time remaining on the clock, but wordlessly all agreeing fuck the clock, fuck it, play it to the end. Out on those runs, speeding after moonset through the smell of the redwoods, with all the lights out, trying to sense among the different patches of darkness where the curves were, and what gear to be in for grades that were nearly impossible to see, bouncing along in a vintage Power Wagon, Zoyd from somebody's collection of beat-up old 8-tracks usually found himself listening to the Eagles Greatest Hits, in particular Take It To The Limit, basically his whole story these days, singing mournfully along, though obliged from time to time to interrupt himself as some new set of headlights appeared -- "OK, Zoyd, back on defense" -- half hoping for a run-in with Brock, knowing by now it was never going to happen in any frontal way, attempting to get back his own small piece of Vineland, but out here at the periphery, in motion, out on one of the roads that had taken him away from his home, and that must lead back . . .

Following the story via the language proved relatively easy (as I said, was like being blissfully along for the ride) but keeping track of the many characters was not, and I'd be remiss not to mention Douglas Albert's Index. You may not want or need it but I found it useful as an enhancement of the reading experience, plus it further reveals and explores Pynchon's literary genius, because Jesus Zoyd Christ, the detailing and synchronizing are simply astonishing.

You can find the index online at: http://www.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/downl...

Here's my fun PLAYLIST, which I am quite proud of and will share on CD if you message me with an address. It does not include every song mentioned in the book. It includes some that are not mentioned based on my take on the characters and story. It is limited to what will fit on an 80-min CD and organized according to my listening preferences. Page numbers reference the 1997 Penguin paperback.

1. Frenesi -- Artie Shaw p. 75
2. Them There Eyes -- Billie Holiday p. 79
3. Pipeline -- The Chantays p. 38
4. Rock and Roll -- Led Zeppelin p. 209
5. Fuck California (Hector does Vineland) -- Presidents of the U.S.of A. p. 356/357
6. Got A Ukelele (just like Takeshi) -- Loudon Wainwright III p. 161/162
7. Love Is Strange -- Everly Brothers p. 16
8. Sam Cooke Medley -- Sam Cooke p. 314
9. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (Weed's lament) -- Bryan Ferry p. 228/229
10. Don't Get Around Much Anymore -- Willie Nelson p. 225
11. Dirty World (Ode to DL) -- Traveling Wilburys Chap. 9 (p. 130)
12. Streetwise Man (I wanna ride) -- Sarah Borges p.274
13 People Are Strange -- the Doors p. 133
14. Cry (Frenesi and DL's lament) -- Siouxsie and the Banshees p. 260
15. Snake Song (I should've known better) -- Eleni Mandell p. 216/217
16. Everybody Knows -- Concrete Blonde entire
17. Wouldn't Want To Be Like You -- Alan Parsons Project p. 150/151
18. Instant Karma -- Lennon/Ono 0.174/175
19. Power to the People -- Black-eyed Peas p. 209
20. Kick Out The Jams -- The Bad Brains p. 191
21. Purple Haze -- Jimi Hendrix p. 18
22. Take It To the Limit (Zoyd's lament) -- the Eagles p. 374
23. Show Me The Way to Go Home -- Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Chap. 15 (p.323)
24. The Future (lullaby for Prairie) -- Eleni Mandell p. 321/322

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Oct 11, 2010 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: phenomenal, read-2007

So when you think of Pynchon you think of serious work, right? And trudgery and difficulty and obfuscation and pedanticism, and like this dizzying thing that just makes you feel unintellectual and slow for never being able to catch up, right?

Well if that is the case, you have never read Vineland . Because oh. my. god. This book is so fucking good.

I'm not going to try to summarize or anything, because this book is too sprawling and reeling, and anyway that would be an afront to its amazingness....more

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Apr 29, 2013 Con McVeety rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: great-and-dense

Prairie, a 14 year daughter of an old time hippie Zoyd, who up till 1984 raises her alone in a hippie retreat in Vineland County. Paririe is sent away by Zoyd, because the DEA is on his tail. Prairie runs into people of her fathers past and learns of her mother's betrayle towards her, her father and the Movement. Vineland is full of culture references from Star Wars, Godzilla, the buger king where's the beef lady ads form T.V. and countless others.
There is so much that goes on in the novel, f...more

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Jul 12, 2012 Frank Roberts rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Other Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, General Dipshits

Shelves: books-to-burn

Can't remember the name of the guy who suggested I read this stack of won tons. He was a waiter I worked with in the North End, had cystic fibrosis and, halfway through Vineland, I recall thinking he was among the dopiest dingbats alive. But I felt bad about that, with the image of him coughing out a heartfelt recommendation for the newest novel from the great Thomas Pynchon. CF cases don't live too long so I finished the fucker.

It's a tragic tale, since Pynchon tells you how it ends in the begi...more

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May 26, 2012 Madeleine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, our-libeary, mmxii, richard-python

I don’t usually finish a book and start a review in the same breath. But I also don’t usually allow myself to read more than one of an author’s works within a calendar year (many books, little time, etc. -- though of course Stephen King would be this year’s other exception because the Tower, all things yield to it): T. Ruggs, you magnificant bastard, I hope you know how many personal rules I’m violating because you’re the first time since auspiciously picking up my first collection of Bukowski p...more I don’t usually finish a book and start a review in the same breath. But I also don’t usually allow myself to read more than one of an author’s works within a calendar year (many books, little time, etc. -- though of course Stephen King would be this year’s other exception because the Tower, all things yield to it): T. Ruggs, you magnificant bastard, I hope you know how many personal rules I’m violating because you’re the first time since auspiciously picking up my first collection of Bukowski poems that I’ve been able to add a This Writer Changed My Life For Always notch to my literary bedpost. Reading “Vineland” confirmed what “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me suspecting: I bloody love Thomas Pynchon. Rilly.

Finishing “Gravity’s Rainbow” left me with an almost obscene urge to help myself to another serving of Pynchon, which is an urge I’ve been fighting for months now. I finally caved, intending to take on “V” but settling for “Vineland” because part of the joy of Pynchon is the inherent madness, and I just can’t handle another meaty tome yet (the latter weighs in at a few pages shy of 400; the former.... uh, does most assuredly not). And because I haven’t talked about GR enough, I am still a little battered from that experience (my opinion on bananas might be forever changed, too). I needed something a little less daunting first. Enter: “Vineland.”

This book was so good. Now being able to pinpoint a Pynchonian pattern – a few: musical outbursts, sleuthing plots, oddball character names, stunning tangents that really aren’t that tangential after all, a natural vocabulary only found in the most ruthless of Scrabble opponents – helped me identify what I adore most about Pynchon’s prose. It’s his ability to concoct some of the most overtly zany scenes in literature, to confront the reader with these in-your-face storms of hilarity for the sake of maximizing the subtle tragedies he gently lets the story consider, leaving the reader to marinate in sadness. It’s an effect that would be any mixture of sloppy, condescending, formulaic or tedious if attempted by anyone else but Pynchon makes it work. The real success is that his characters who need be sympathetic are so when someone realizes that her best days are behind her or comes to the dawning realization that he’s being used by an entire government or has an ugly epiphany about the mother she never knew, it is the most heartbreaking scene in the world.

As for the effort involved in decoding the obscure references that are sprinkled throughout Pynchon’s books as liberally as the Bacon Bits on any salad worth eating, I was deeply grateful that T. Ruggs's novel begins the same year as I did, which meant I caught waywayWAAAAY more cultural allusions this time. The narrative flows better when I’m not running to a secondary source every three lines and I appreciated the opportunity to enjoy this book less haltingly, which isn't to say that I didn't need to have a few reference materials handy. There were enough hazy hippie memories to keep me on my toes, though I caught a number of those as often as I had a flutter of joyful recognition every time The Doors or Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or some other People's Republic of Rock and Roll favorite got a shout-out.

I feel a reread of "The Crying of Lot 49" and maybe "Inherent Vice" in my future. Color me fucking amped.(less)

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Feb 12, 2009 Jimmy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I had a preconceived notion of what just how good Vineland would be before I read it. My opinions about the book have been influenced by numerous accounts of how weak it was. After having read everything that preceded Pynchon's fourth novel, it's still difficult for me to wholeheartedly disagree, even though I thoroughly enjoyed some parts of it. It made me laugh...but even though I wasn't an avid fan when it was published in 1990, I still couldn't help wonder why this was the book that Pynchon...more I had a preconceived notion of what just how good Vineland would be before I read it. My opinions about the book have been influenced by numerous accounts of how weak it was. After having read everything that preceded Pynchon's fourth novel, it's still difficult for me to wholeheartedly disagree, even though I thoroughly enjoyed some parts of it. It made me laugh...but even though I wasn't an avid fan when it was published in 1990, I still couldn't help wonder why this was the book that Pynchon decided to put out there seventeen years after Gravity's Rainbow. The basic sentiment stands; it's inevitable that anything that he had published after Gravity's Rainbow would pale in comparison. That novel is wonderful, and despite my inability to explain exactly why it is, I have a hard time sincerely saying that his subsequent effort really matched up at all. So there it is, I've said it. I've been influenced by descriptions of Vineland, as well as my preconceived expectation for utter disappointment, and now I have to talk about it. However, Salman Rushdie seemed to have enjoyed it. His NYT review is glowing with beatnick-pastiche zeal.

Vineland basically begins with Zoyd Wheeler, a burnt-out "generic long-hair" who is preparing to do his annual publicity stunt (jumping through the window of a bar) in order to cash in on his disability check issued by the government. His old arch-nemesis Hector Zuniga shows up looking for his old lady, Frenesi Gates, and is wondering; will Zoyd help the FBI and the DEA please find out where she is? His daughter Prairie is interested, as much as a young daughter could be in her counterculture/hippie/anarchist/ filmmaker mother. The narrative unfolds through old friends explaining Frenesi's tumultuous political existence to her estranged daughter.

It's in this context that Pynchon covers a lot of ground. What follows is basically a critique of both the Nixon and Reagan years. It's mostly vitriol too, as Pynchon has obviously been harboring in many of these views since finishing Gravity's Rainbow. As usual, it isn't unbalanced because he makes a point of addressing the fact that the hippie movement had failed due to the way that this particular historical revolution had been sublimated by popular culture, television, drugs, rock and roll music, etc. This is all thanks to the American government, and a point that Pynchon wants to stress throughout the book.

How is it though? I don't know. Maybe if I had read it when it just came out in 1990? Hunter S. Thomspon's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas covers the same ground, as well as countless other authors. Whether or not I actually have read enough about the 60's, I simply feel like I know too much about this point in history, and that my knowledge of which has been negatively influenced by romantic cliches. Most of Vineland's pomo zaniness feels stilted, due to this particular style being heavily exploited throughout the early nineties. Pynchon's tone and style seem weak throughout, making Vineland sound, at times, like someone ghostwriting for him. It just lacks the acerbic wit and humor that all of his previous novels embody. I don't think I need to remind too many people that the Crying of Lot 49 covered the same historical period in time with a little more...character.

Is it great Pynchon, no. Is it bad Pynchon, no. It's just Pynchon, and personally that is a statment that I would like to avoid using.
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Sep 01, 2008 Algernon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

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 p...more

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Oct 06, 2007 Alex rated it 4 of 5 stars

As dense and meaty as Pynchon ever was. The odd references are easier to pick up, now that they refer to Godzilla and grunge punk instead of doo-wop or Baron von Ribbentrop. I'll never argue with the addition of ninjas to a work of high literature, and though the action does come packed- motorcycle rescues from campus riots, late-night blackout drug runs- the images are often watered down with that heavy, heavy prose. An example:
"As time went by, that is, he did begin to wonder. But could not...more As dense and meaty as Pynchon ever was. The odd references are easier to pick up, now that they refer to Godzilla and grunge punk instead of doo-wop or Baron von Ribbentrop. I'll never argue with the addition of ninjas to a work of high literature, and though the action does come packed- motorcycle rescues from campus riots, late-night blackout drug runs- the images are often watered down with that heavy, heavy prose. An example:
"As time went by, that is, he did begin to wonder. But could not ask-- she would only evade, turn her head away and smile, not in any sinister way but with a child's secretive semipro glaze, longing-- though she only told him years later how she used it to get her through-- for the Retreat, the cloudy ridge, the high dark walls, where she could nest for a while with the others-- not crippled sparrows but birds of prey, ragged from the storm, tired from the hunt, in for a little R and R-- longing for the mountains, much as she'd once romantically imagined about her old teacher Inoshiro Sensei."
So Pynchon's prose has always been soft down and switchback curves. What can be said except, if you loved him before, you'll love him now. You have to wonder just how much research he did on 80's drug culture for this book. The structure of his images (see above) gets often close to, and sometimes way beyond, schizophrenic in their complexity. Characters become birds, clowns, soldiers, plants, and mobsters all in the space of a few pages. Motivations are so meticulously explained that you feel, from time to time, that there is nothing left to reveal to yourself. Pynchon has seen it all, and written it.
So sometimes the book looks more like a poetic dictionary of the human experience than an energeic novel. If anyone but Pynchon had their hands on those strings, the plot would fall apart. The book would be worthless. But since it is Pynchon, and he knows where his characters go no matter where they wander off to, and he knows how to call them back home, it works. This is a lovely book. And if you have the patience to sit and read it, please, by all means. (less)

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May 26, 2011 Alice rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club

Vineland covers a lot of ground, in a jumping-hither-and-thither fashion. It frequently revolves around issues of the viewer and the viewed (especially regarding TV), the user and the used (be it narcs or emotional entrapment), and the dependent individual in contrast to the independent. A web of people come together and separate across time, all ending up in the titular Vineland and often revolving around the family of one Frenesi Gates. Though the space-cadet time line can make any one charact...more

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Nov 25, 2007 Tempest rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pynchon has a clever way of twisting words and editing sentences so that they allude to a lot more than what is on the page. This is interesting, but because of the overwhelming cleverness of it all, prevents me from really becoming involved with the characters. Everything is so external that I am never able to fully trust the personas Pynchon presents. Having no insight into the character's internal workings, they remain a story and never morph into a person.

Nonetheless--Pynchon has style, and...more

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Mar 12, 2013 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Originally published on my blog here in August 2009.

On opening Vineland, it is almost immediately clear that this is going to be a riotous novel. By the third chapter, the reader has been introduced to a man who makes his living by annually throwing himself through a plate glass window wearing a dress to qualify for mental illness disability benefit, a punk band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones, hired unheard to play at a traditional Mafia wedding by pretending to be Italian, and an FBI agent...more Originally published on my blog here in August 2009.

On opening Vineland, it is almost immediately clear that this is going to be a riotous novel. By the third chapter, the reader has been introduced to a man who makes his living by annually throwing himself through a plate glass window wearing a dress to qualify for mental illness disability benefit, a punk band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones, hired unheard to play at a traditional Mafia wedding by pretending to be Italian, and an FBI agent who may also be an escaped lunatic.

There is a bit of a dip in quality in the middle, once the flashbacks to the early seventies begin to take over, and from that point on Vineland is less funny. I don't think this is just due to my inability to conentrate, though I was extremely tired while reading this section of the novel.

The theme of Vineland is the hippy dream turning sour, and in particular the effects of the US government's attempts to extinguish the counter-culture. The main narrative is set in the mid-eighties, during Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, and it is clear that Pynchon wants to make two points: first, that the repercussions of this crackdown affected lives both on the hippy side and in the law enforcement agencies right through the next fifteen years; and, second, that it was worth warning his readership about parallels between Nixon and Reagan.

"Vinland" is of course the name used by the Vikings to (almost certainly) mean the American continent, so implies that this is a novel about all of America - in other words, Pynchon intends to write what has been described as "the great American novel". However, reading it suggests that actually he wanted to subvert and satirise the idea of the great American novel. By making Vineland in the book a small (fictional) town in northern California, he is perhaps making a dig at the limited horizons of eighties American culture, and this is doubled by concentrating on hippy culture, never involving anything other than a small minority of US citizens.

Gravity's Rainbow and V. might have a bigger literary reputation, but of the Pynchon novels I have read - not all of them by any means - this is the most accessible, and the funniest. Each chapter in the first half made me laugh out loud at some point, even on re-reading. It has an easier plot to follow than Gravity's Rainbow in particular, which also helps make it an easier read.(less)

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Nov 22, 2012 Julia Di Piazza rated it 3 of 5 stars

Vineland is packed with a multitude of pop-culture references and complex themes. It is definitely a book that I would need to read probably three or four times at least to fully comprehend it (if that is even at all possible). (view spoiler)...more Vineland is packed with a multitude of pop-culture references and complex themes. It is definitely a book that I would need to read probably three or four times at least to fully comprehend it (if that is even at all possible). (view spoiler)
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Oct 13, 2012 sologdin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopian, literary

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...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Tiredstars rated it 4 of 5 stars

Vineland is a bit of a mess of a book, but I really enjoyed it. Everyone knows a bit about hippies and has some preconceived notions about them. I don't think many can trace a route from radical activism of the 30s, 40s and 50s through to the hippy heyday, to their failures and defeat. Certainly it's a whole area that I don't know much about, so I enjoyed finding out about it. Vineland gives a skewed and untrustworthy history, but one that fits the subject.

The book sometimes feels like genuine p

...more

The book sometimes feels like genuine people's history, buried histories of strike-breaking and radicalism. At other times it's exaggerated, and at other times outright fantastical. The blurring of the three certainly makes the book less dry and more entertaining. There's no mistaking it for anything like a realistic, historical account. In its style it also gives an insight into the worldview of the protagonists.

It also highlights - albeit through a lens of fiction - that the hippy movement didn't just peter out by itself, it also faced repression, violent and legal. The use of the War on Drugs in the book reminded me of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, where the purpose of prison is not so much to stop crime, but to create and control a class of people who can be used by the state (as informants, thugs, suppliers of illicit pleasures, etc.).

I had three complaints about the book.

First, I found it unusually hard to follow. It's not just the narrative jumping about or even the idioms and speech patters of the characters. I often found it hard to follow what was going on, from paragraph to paragraph, and I don't really know why that was. There were also bits that I simply didn't get.

(view spoiler)

Finally, perhaps worst of all, is the glossing over of sexual violence and threat. It crops up occasionally, and there are regular mentions of officers taking opportunities to cop a feel of students during round-ups. This never builds above harassment to a sense of menace though, even in the most exploitable situations. The main relationship between power and sex is of women's desire for (or willing submission to) powerful men.

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Feb 08, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thomas-pynchon

-probably the easiest pynchon ive read so far, very tight and concise but still manages to be a sprawling epic with multiple entwined plots, characters, settings and sex jokes

-politically a very easy novel (in terms of how easy i got it, the 80s being a little bit closer culturally to me than the 1900s), with a good message (messages?). not quite sure what the overall message is but as far as i know its a condemnation of facism, reaganism, the 80s, the death of the counter-culture, television an...more -probably the easiest pynchon ive read so far, very tight and concise but still manages to be a sprawling epic with multiple entwined plots, characters, settings and sex jokes

-politically a very easy novel (in terms of how easy i got it, the 80s being a little bit closer culturally to me than the 1900s), with a good message (messages?). not quite sure what the overall message is but as far as i know its a condemnation of facism, reaganism, the 80s, the death of the counter-culture, television and anti-drug legislation. as far as things it doesnt condemn it appears: sex, music, love, food, drugs, unions, anarcho-communism (a bit iffy but eh).

-also a highly feminist book; we follow prairie wheeler, her mother frenesi gates and DL chastain for the most part: all 3 strong women. in comparison the men are either helpless, ie zoyd and takeshi (both are likable however) or the disgusting brock vond. vond is essentially facism and misogyny in fictitious character form and it makes his ever-present power throughout the novel even more threatening

-structurally the book is great, the way the "nested flashbacks" work as if the reader is watching a film help with the themes of addiction to the Tube (pynchons capitalisations are The Best Capitalisations) and make for engrossing reading. he knows how to pull a reader in and then jump them back into the 'real world' of the novel and its used to great effect here. i find the middle third of the book to be particularly weak - suffering from a huge 80-page chapter which is difficult to get through and jumps about consistently (i cant read 80 pages in one sitting so this took me 2 weeks to get through)

-i am still unsure of some plot points - mainly what thanatoids are and why and who (and im pretty sure pynchon actually explains them outright so im sure im supposed to understand by the end) and i dont see what the godzilla jokes had to do with anything

-ENDING CHAT - (view spoiler)(less)

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Jan 04, 2012 Alec rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

I get the impression that Thomas Pynchon is one of those authors who are famous for writing big, wise books that nobody actually reads, like a drugged-up, American Cervantes, or Thackery, or Joyce. Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day; these are less novels than they are building materials. I always remember the scene in the Whitby Witches (by the brilliant Robin Jarvis, responsible for all the best childhood terrors and a lingering suspicion that rodents are up to something shift...more

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Sep 21, 2011 manuti rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

He empezado regular con las lecturas del 2008-2009. Este libro y otro de este autor (Maxon y Dixon en concreto), eran de esos que tenía pendiente. Al final decidí empezar con uno de ellos y me ha defraudado bastante.

Vineland es difícil de leer, con capítulos largos y sin puntos y aparte que te obligan o a leer más allá de lo que deseas o si lo dejas en cualquier punto, luego tienes que estar releyendo para retomar el hilo. Con una trama dispersa y una cantidad de personajes bastante amplia con h...more

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Feb 24, 2011 Noah Enelow rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is hilarious, witty, raunchy, full of dazzling Joyceean passages, one-liners, and zany comic-book action. It gets four stars for sheer chutzpah. Not to mention its cartoonish characters, some of which are more three-dimensional than others. Who could fail to appreciate a dazed and confused, aging hippie burnout named Zoyd, whose chief source of income stems from public displays of insanity; a red diaper baby secretly turned on by power (literally and figuratively); a priapic math profe...more
This book is hilarious, witty, raunchy, full of dazzling Joyceean passages, one-liners, and zany comic-book action. It gets four stars for sheer chutzpah. Not to mention its cartoonish characters, some of which are more three-dimensional than others. Who could fail to appreciate a dazed and confused, aging hippie burnout named Zoyd, whose chief source of income stems from public displays of insanity; a red diaper baby secretly turned on by power (literally and figuratively); a priapic math professor named Weed Atman; an outwardly celibate female ninja who occasionally turns tricks and is named - wait for it - DL Chastain! The villian, CIA megalomaniac/frat-boy philistine Brock Vond, is a suitably vile creation with just enough depth to turn your stomach. Not all characters hit the mark: Hector, the TV-addicted federal agent of Chicano extraction is just a bit too stereotyped; Takeshi, the Japanese "karmic adjuster"-cum-lounge singer lacks depth. Let's face it - Pynchon is U.S.-centric and masculinist. But for sheer entertainment value, this novel kicks ass.

The biggest problem with the novel that I saw, which may be the reason why it's often called Pynchon's worst, is its relative lack of structure and thematic development. It starts out with a bang (or a crash, really), goes everywhere, and ends nowhere. It has a dizzying array of subplots culminating in sub-climaxes, but it ends without really tying the loose ends into any kind of coherent resolution. In other words, it has a tendency to follow a Fordist conception of history, i.e., "one damn thing after another." If you pick it up in the middle and read any of the detailed flashbacks that are meant to explain the origins of the "main character," Zoyd's ingenuous and credulous daughter Prairie, each of those flashbacks almost works as a story unto itself. Not only that, each flashback explains a different aspect of the disappointing, often horrific transition from utopian-revolutionary-hedonistic '60s bliss to burned-out, conservative-cum-fascist '70s "Nixonian reaction," right up to the complacency and latent aggression of the '80s and the "War on Drugs." Pynchon doesn't give us nostalgia, however - he portrays the '60s counterculture as full of moral naivete, superficial spiritual yearnings, and intellectual vacuity, although a good time was had by all.

If you're a fan of '60s lore, this book is for you. If you like whiz-bang action and adrenaline-rush writing, this book is for you. If you like carefully constructed, Flaubertian novels with each thing in its right place, don't touch this thing with a ten-foot-pole. Cheers! (less)

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Nov 06, 2010 Eileen rated it 2 of 5 stars

i read this book after only reading one book before by pynchon which was the crying of lot 49 and i did not like Vineland at all. i think the reason i didn't like it is because the novel is written as if it were a movie, with grandoise scenes and over dramatized elements, such as the scene where DL is goes up on stage to sing a song--i remember she kind of struts up there on stage even though her and Prarie are currently in a rush and pressured to leave the place and go somewhere else, but she s...more

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Oct 06, 2009 Momoselli rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

I bucked the suggestion that new readers of Mr. Pynchon start with Gravity's Rainbow, typically cited as his most celebrated work. I started with Vineland. I am a 40-something from the PacNW, so his hippie tale spoke to me as an entrance into this writer's brilliance. Having only read this book, I'm very satisfied with my starter selection. I wonder whether someone born in the ‘70s+ or in other parts of the world can recognize his allusions or how critical that is to the enjoyment. I offer only...more

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Sep 28, 2009 Ron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read about half of this many years ago, getting sidetracked when some life event intervened in my serious reading schedule. Finally picked it up and re-read it from scratch. It's a pretty amazing book: easier to follow that Gravity's Rainbow, of course, but in many ways nearly as effective in its sarcastic and zany subversiveness.

That it's a scathing look at the underbelly of the Reagan-driven 80s (as seen through the lens of the degenerate remains of the California counter-culture) makes it i...more

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Mar 06, 2011 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

It is not without a certain amount of pride and relief that I can finally announce having succeeded in a long-standing literary challenge to myself: finishing a Thomas Pynchon book. It's not that I don't enjoy his books, far from it. I got a few hundred pages into Mason & Dixon and really liked it, and a hundred or so pages into Against the Day and liked that as well. But, as anyone who's ever tried reading a Pynchon novel can confirm, these are not books you read quickly or easily.

The key c...more It is not without a certain amount of pride and relief that I can finally announce having succeeded in a long-standing literary challenge to myself: finishing a Thomas Pynchon book. It's not that I don't enjoy his books, far from it. I got a few hundred pages into Mason & Dixon and really liked it, and a hundred or so pages into Against the Day and liked that as well. But, as anyone who's ever tried reading a Pynchon novel can confirm, these are not books you read quickly or easily.

The key characteristics of Pynchon's novels, which have made him beloved among the critics but somewhat daunting for the casual reader, include loads of obscure vocabulary, endless sentences (though fortunately only every now and then), complicated plotlines that hop back and forth in time, slang and dialects, eccentric characters, surrealistic elements, casual references to all sorts of things both real and made up, and a certain frivolity that keeps things from becoming overly pretentious.

So when I started Vineland, after the two aborted attempts to read a Pynchon novel from front to cover mentioned above, I was warned, and prepared myself for a long but worthwhile struggle, even if this book is a good bit shorter than those other two, at less than 400 pages. Rather surprisingly, I finished it in less than a week, and once read over a hundred pages in a day, so calling it a struggle would be a stretch. But it definitely was worthwhile.

Vineland is set in the fictional town of Vineland in northern California, mostly in the time period from the late sixties until 1984, against the background of the War on Drugs and the FBI's efforts to neutralize the more radical communist or anti-establishment movements born in the sixties. It starts with Zoyd, a former hippie and single father raising his teenage daughter Prairie through a combination of mental disability checks, odd jobs here and there and a yearly stunt involving jumping through windows in drag. But when an old enemy shows up in town again, their lives and the plot rapidly become very complicated, as they and the reader discover the truth about what happened back in the sixties, and why Prairie's mother Frenesi could not stay with them. Though things are not quite so simple or neatly tied up as that makes them sound.

This is very much a political novel, with some very interesting passages and views on how the various left-wing movements and student collectives of the sixties were created and then fell apart, on their own or with FBI help. The antagonist of the novel is a federal attorney named Brock Vond, Frenesi's more-or-less-boyfriend, with a rather nasty streak and a love for intriguing, manipulation, infiltration and burning down fields of marihuana crops; and many of the characters habitually refer to the American government of the seventies and eighties as "fascist". But Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon if he left it at that. So he throws in UFOs, male nuns on Harley Davidsons, all-female ninja gangs, some sort of Godzilla-ish mystery which is never really explained and the "Thanatoid" cult, which is. Mostly.

With so much of the book dealing with drugs and the War on Drugs, the description of the novel as being a political novel on acid is perhaps not very original, but that's probably still the best way of describing it to someone who's never read a Pynchon novel. There certainly is a plot, there is character development, there are themes, but none of it very straightforward or linear. This is not a book for people liking simple answers, or endings that neatly tie up everything. It would be a valuable read to those interested in learning more about American socio-cultural evolutions in the sixties and thereafter, the hippie movement and the backlash against it, but it certainly shouldn't be taken at face value - some things are obviously real and some obviously made-up, but at times it's not entirely clear which is which. I liked it a lot for what it was, though, and would warmly recommend it, albeit with the caveats mentioned throughout this review.

(Review originally posted at RAFO.)(less)

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Nov 14, 2012 Jose Luis rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jose Luis by: Los bloggers que conspiran contra mí

Si yo quiero que me guste Pynchon... De verdad, me encantaría ser un fan de Pynchon, leerme todos sus libros una y otra vez, y entenderlos, pero es que no hay manera. Yo creo que mi problema es que no me gusta el cómic, y mucho menos el cómic underground. Y creo que Pynchon es en buena medida eso, puro cómic underground, con su toque lisérgico y su neblina cannábica. Sus páginas devienen en viñetas, sus personajes en dibujos más con menos caricaturescos...

Yo nunca he sonreído con una broma de P...more Si yo quiero que me guste Pynchon... De verdad, me encantaría ser un fan de Pynchon, leerme todos sus libros una y otra vez, y entenderlos, pero es que no hay manera. Yo creo que mi problema es que no me gusta el cómic, y mucho menos el cómic underground. Y creo que Pynchon es en buena medida eso, puro cómic underground, con su toque lisérgico y su neblina cannábica. Sus páginas devienen en viñetas, sus personajes en dibujos más con menos caricaturescos...

Yo nunca he sonreído con una broma de Pynchon, con uno solo de sus juegos de palabras, con ninguno de sus nombres absurdos, que tanto gustan, quizá, al lector angloparlante. Como decía Salman Rushdie, creo, que se reía a carcajadas con ocurrencias como Tokkata &Fuji... Y yo, pues que no. Y que me pierdo. Que no entiendo esos torbellinos que arrasan aquí y allá la página, entre ocasionales pasajes de frases interminables absolutamente bellos y personajes deliciosos, al menos hasta que estos se convierten en tinta china fluorescente y más o menos chillona, y el relato en aquella narración estroboscópica que llenaba el Gravity's Rainbow.

Y cómo me gustaría bajar los rápidos de ese flujo narrativo que va atropellando puntos de vista y voces y lugares y tiempos, pero es que me ahogo. Creo que también puede ser cuestión de ritmo. No lo sé. (Claro que en ese primer tercio de Vineland, más sereno, más convencional, ha llegado un momento en que he empezado a aburrirme...)

Y luego está el tema de la entropía, o el tema de la paranoia... Siempre digo que la paranoia es la única forma sana de relacionarse con el mundo contemporáneo, de vivir estos tiempos... Y estos conceptos se dibujan en la narrativa de Pynchon con una lucidez sin límites, salvo los que impone la ininteligibilidad del texto.

Es esa lucidez a la hora de captar el espíritu de los tiempos, más allá de aspectos frívolos como su fobia a las cámaras y a los medios, lo que hace que el lector de Pynchon se sienta como una especie de iniciado, alguien que Sabe, porque el tipo misterioso le ha susurrado al oído cuatro verdades. Ese algo que uno intuyó en V., aun en estado embrionario, o en la Subasta, en estado amorfo, o en el Arcoiris, en estado ausente, o ilocalizable. Porque no hay manera. A la mierda el pulpo, a la mierda Godzilla y a la mierda los ninjas. No puedo.

No me gusta Pynchon.(less)

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Jun 19, 2011 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really want to like Thomas Pynchon, but after two novels of his down now, I'm not sure that I'm capable of getting him. It's crazy to me that there exists a book that is more difficult to follow than David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (which I loved), but Vineland is it. It started off more cohesively than The Crying of Lot 49, but as it is roughly 250 pages longer, it was even easier to get derailed by all of the intricate and bizarre plot lines. I have no idea how to even begin explaining...more

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Jun 27, 2012 Lucian McMahon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Classic Pynchon: complexly convoluted, erratically jumping around different characters and time periods; narratives within narratives within narratives, often so labyrinthine that when he returns to the actual narrative you’ve forgotten what is actually going on.

As far as I can tell, the book is an interesting study in innocent, anarchic, childish naivete—guised in the hippy drug-euphoria of the sixties-early seventies and personified in musician-turned-ersatz-mentally-disabled-pothead Zoyd Whe...more

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Sep 14, 2010 Ed rated it 4 of 5 stars

I thought I was going give to this book a 3/5 for most of it. For context, The only other Pynchon I'd read was The Crying of Lot 49, which was delightful.

I started out reveling in the use of language, but quickly got mired down in the seemingly pointless convolutions of narrative. I didn't realize until the last ten or so pages that it was all a clever ruse. Every turn and double-back serves to disguise just who the story is really about. At various points, if you had asked me, I would have told...more

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May 16, 2013 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Turned, and turning - the light from the sea, the rights and wrongs she'd picked up from Hub and Sasha, the tides of need that Brock, her inconsistent moon, brought and took . . . he would have everything, the little fucker would get it all his way, because from then on, though they would still now and then pretend, both knew she had nothing more to negotiate with. He would not even spare her from the first thing she had sworn to him she'd never do - at some point she had to go up in front of hi...more

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Feb 17, 2009 Aerin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: litrachur, americana, twisty-turny

It's hard to rate a novel that's as all-over-the-place as Vineland is. Parts of it are utterly sublime: hilarious, poignant, and perfectly composed. Periodically while reading this book, I had to stop, go back several pages, and read them again a few more times, just to marvel at Pynchon's ability to write absurd scenarios that reveal elegant truths. But other parts of this book are tremendously boring, difficult to parse, and indulgently tangential to anything resembling a plot. A good editor c...more It's hard to rate a novel that's as all-over-the-place as Vineland is. Parts of it are utterly sublime: hilarious, poignant, and perfectly composed. Periodically while reading this book, I had to stop, go back several pages, and read them again a few more times, just to marvel at Pynchon's ability to write absurd scenarios that reveal elegant truths. But other parts of this book are tremendously boring, difficult to parse, and indulgently tangential to anything resembling a plot. A good editor could have pared this down into a 250-page masterpiece. As it is, at nearly 400 pages, it's just frustrating. This is why I enjoy reading Pynchon but stick to his shorter novels. I will probably never have the stamina to get through Gravity's Rainbow.

The main plot in Vineland follows Prairie, a teenager in the early 80's, who is searching for the mother she never knew. Frenesi had been many things: hippie, documentarian, lesbian, dreamer, subversive, transient, double agent. Now she's disappeared. As Prairie learns about her mother's past from old associates and lovers, the reader is presented with Pynchon's scathing take on the sixties, seventies, and early eighties. Rehab clinics for TV addicts, professional karma adjusters, enclaves where the living dead gather, a holy order of female ninjas... all portray a confused society, fraying at the seams and no longer able to make sense of itself. It's insane and hilarious and depressingly familiar, all at once. These are, by far, the best parts of the book. But when it breaks off into meandering sideplots, following a cast of characters too large to ever keep mental track of, describing events that have no bearing on the main story, that's when my eyes would start to glaze over for page after page. I'd find I'd just read five pages and had no idea what had just happened. I'd go back, read them again, and still nothing would stick. Finally, I'd skip ahead to where things started looking interesting again. I don't like to skip around like that in fiction, but there's no way I'd have finished this book if I hadn't.

Now that I'm finished with it and can mentally gloss over the boring parts, I want to say that this is a great book. But then I remember how frustrated I was while reading it, how often it felt like an endless slog, and I have to amend my standpoint: it's just a good book. Or a great book that has several awful parts. Or an awful book that has several great parts. I don't know. It's Pynchon. It's awesome. It's difficult. It's bizarre.(less)

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Feb 11, 2013 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was a frustrating read. I am a big fan of Pynchon's works and was able to trudge through the more difficult digressions whereas with another author I would have likely given up. The Thanatoid/Ninja digressions were the most difficult to get through though I have a new-found appreciation for them now that I have finished the book. The plot centers around a young woman's search for her mother and covers a wide swath of geographical and temporal territory. Don't be mislead into thinking t...more

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Sep 22, 2007 Andrea LeClair rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, wackiness

I adore this book. I've read it several times and I'm still not sure I understand how it all unfolds, and how these strange characters' lives come together in this not-quite-our-world, but it's a story about loss and about unlikely partnerships and personal history forming a mythology and there are paragraphs - and whole pages - that still make my breath catch.

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About Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American writer based in New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963...more

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Quotes from Vineland

“It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.” — 8 people liked it

“Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.” — 3 people liked it

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