Vineland

De: Thomas Pynchon

Narrado por: Graham Winton

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 '60s 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 Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sports car scene in V.).

©1990 Thomas Pynchon (P)2018 Recorded Books

A ride on the wild side…

Narrator is Graham Winton who did an excellent job. Listeners indicated… Rollicking Story - Hilarious Digressions - Exemplary Performance - Stoner Innocent Embrace - Complex Character Arcs

I agree. Although I’ll need to listen or read it a second time because it needs your full attention and I didn’t give it that. While listening I enjoyed the writing, the humor, the multitude of references to everything under the sun.

In brief, it’s a story about hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie who is trying to find out what happened to her mother Frenesi, a 60s radical who ran off with a narc when she was still a baby.

Below I’ll add some excerpts of the best reviews I found. Mostly because I can’t do it justice by myself.

“Compulsively funny and featuring some great crackerjack riffs, if you take the hippie movement and roll it around with a dose of political satire and then throw in some Asian ninja flicks, 80s action B-movies, wacky cartoons, spirituality (possible extraterrestrials) and more, you kind of get Vineland.” —Steven

“American History is always the unnamed character in a Pynchon story and its antagonist always seems to be the mythology of American History.” —D.A.

About Pynchon: “…all his gifts and his mysteries are on display here, wrapped up in one of his most enjoyable, inexplicable, and lushly all-enveloping plots.” —Warwick

“I’m not going to summarize or anything, because this book is too sprawling and reeling and anyway that would be an affront to its amazingness.” —Oriana

So in a nutshell… go along for the ride… you won’t be disappointed as long as you allow yourself to be lost and have faith you’ll be okay on the other side. It’s kind of like falling down a rabbit hole like an Alice in Wonderland… but it’s into the 80s.

Not like the movie

I can see now why movie is loosely adapted. I enjoyed the parts with Zoyd and Prarie but had a hard time keeping up with characters and following the story. Could’ve been just distracted but failed to hold my attention.

A classic

A classic from Thomas Pynchon, loved it. Will definitely listen again 5 years from now.

Middle Period Pynchon Holds onto '60s Aesthetic

This is, as far as I can tell, middle-period Pynchon, maybe, excepting Mason & Dixon, the only middle-period Pynchon. There’s the late stuff, the fun genre send-ups of Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. And there’s the early stuff, V and Gravity’s Rainbow, that developed a new model of fiction and established him as a potential Nobel laureate. I haven’t read a few key ones of those, particularly Gravity’s Rainbow, but I still have a sense of where his career started and ended.

What’s new to me is the degree to which Pynchon seems committed to celebrating the aesthetics of the counter culture. You see traces in the early novels, I suppose, and in the way he famously declined the National Book Award, sending Professor Irwin Corey in his stead. They get amplified in Inherent Vice, where our middle-aged ex-hippie hero takes a turn as a private investigator.

I read Vineland around the time it came out, but I simply wasn’t mature enough to recognize how flat-out funny this is, how relentlessly it plays with the stereotypes and expectations of the late 1960s stereotype. Then, I tried to see it as a sort of sequel to V, as a novel experimenting with post-modern form. Now I see it as what reviewers of the time suggested it was: a slighter version of what Pynchon had been doing in his early novels, a book from a writer who’d seemed to resign his station as great-American-novelist in favor of over-the-top entertainer.

This is entertaining, and it does seem to be exploring the form of what I like to call the rhizomatic novel, but above all it seems to be insisting – in the middle of the Reagan era – that the ideals of the original counter culture weren’t as misplaced as contemporary opinion had it. The political revolutionaries of the time may have been sell-outs, the gurus may have “died” in some form, the rock and rollers may have turned out to be little more than lounge singers with worse haircuts and tackier suits, but something in their aesthetic remains valid.

The more I read, the more I got the sense of Pynchon seeing himself in some perverse way as a kind of “Milton of the Movement,” a true-believer (though in this case a true believer in a kind of studied nonsense rather than in Protestant predestination) who set out to write enduring literature within the aesthetic of the cause.

In other words, I think that’s what Pynchon’s middle career means – an abandonment of his early literary ambition but a renewed claim on the legacy of the 1960s rock-and-roll moment. I reserve the right to change that opinion if I ever do read Mason & Dixon or Against the Day, but that’s what stands out to me here: an unironic embrace of Zoyd as the stoner-innocent, a gesture of affection if not quite respect for what must have seemed the wave of tomorrow when he was a young man trying to find his own voice.

It doesn’t bother me that this one is a mess, not when it’s as funny line by line as it is, but I am somewhat bothered by the easy sexism of making Frenesi, the angel of the early movement, a woman who can’t resist the cruel sexuality of a jack-booted government agent. (And, to make things worse, [SPOILER] that her daughter Prairie ends the novel discovering the same shameful impulse.) Zoyd gets to carry the banner of the better-the-world-through-rock-and-dope belief, but the women in his world fall short of that.

So, yeah, this is enormous fun, but it feels dated too. Pynchon was better when he was younger, and I think he was probably less restrained in his later years. Here in his transition, he mostly got it right, but I think he’s also learned something since this as well.

Pynchon is the best

I loved this book. With Thomas Pynchon is more about the journey than the destination. So just kick back, don’t worry about the plot, and enjoy.