VINELAND - THOMAS PYNCHON

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Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve read all of the Pynchon novels (which is all of the Pynchon outside of a short story collection called SLOW LEARNER) and not only is he a total master with no misses, I’d now like to, someday, read all the novels back-to-back, quickly, to see how they vibe off one another. Like I said, they’re all good and now I’m able to think about them all together and bounce them off one another in different ways. For instance, where do you put VINELAND? It’s not one of the epics (ie GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, MASON & DIXON, AGAINST THE DAY) but it does share characters, or character’s families with ATD. It’s one of 3, along with BLEEDING EDGE and THE CRYING OF LOT 49, that feature a female main character. It’s probably most similar, plot wise and in location to INHERENT VICE. VINELAND certainly has the worst reputation of all the Pynchon novels and that strikes me as quite unfair, this book has everything you come to Pynchon for. There’s the zaniness and hyper-erudition you expect. We get a 2001 monolith of weed, a music fakebook written by Deluze and Guatarri, someone who fucks a car, a home-birth while the father’s high on acid, a former Nazi, anti-drug pilot named Karl Bopp, characters who travel to the Bardo, references to Godzilla and how that would effect the insurance industry, a ninja academy, an all-Black version of Star Trek, to name a few short episodes. The larger plot takes place in 1984 and is about Pynchon’s favorite subject, the 60’s, their potential and their disillusion. A girl goes looking for her mom, who was a 60’s radical who’s gone underground and who she’s (the daughter) never met. It’s Pynchon so it sprawls out to include basically everything but we largely focus on how the establishment was able to crush the revolutionary spirit of the times. The confrontation centers around a short-lived occupation of a fictional California college which renamed itself the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. There’s a fun detail that the person they choose as their charismatic leader is basically only chosen because he’s tall. The plot zeros in on the relationship between the mom and a cop who’s trying to crush the movement and to what extent she betrays the PRRR. This twist makes the book more difficult and ambiguous than, say, INHERENT VICE since not only is the cop rape-y (of course, Pynchon writes great evil cops) it remains fluid how much the mom is culpable. All this stuff was quite interesting in light of my CHOP experiences. Nothing changes. There’s a lot of stuff about TV in the book, he creates a new class of half-living, half-dead things called Thanatoids that are connected to TV, some of it is quite insightful like this, “Whole problem ’th you folks’s generation,...nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap…” Which is great but the criticism actually works better w/r/t the Internet. If Pynchon was young now, young enough to have grown up with the net (he wrote a net book, BE, but it's a real web 1.0 affair) we’d be truly blessed, the “it’s watching you while you’re watching it” thing is heavy in this book and the real-life internet catches up to this paranoia. The book is fascinating also when you think about it as an autopsy of the radical 60’s, set in 1984, but written in ‘90. He’s very smart about how a total sea-change for American society didn’t take place when the hippies wanted it to, but did take place under Reagan. It’s quite an interesting vantage point and it’s also impressive he calls out the Bush/CIA drug smuggling in ‘90. Either way, a really fun book, I think I’d recommend it as a “first Pynchon.” 1984 smurfs.