This is now my fourth Pynchon I’ve read, I started out as most do with The Crying of Lot 49 which I just did not get at all and which led me to disregard Pynchon as not worth my time for the next couple years until for some reason I decided to pick up V. which I had the complete opposite reaction to and which to this day remains my favourite of his. And then of course there’s Gravity’s Rainbow which confused, entertained and terrified me in equal measures, and is probably near the top of my ever growing list of books I really need to re-read one day. Its been another couple years now though since I’ve read any of Pynchon’s work, which I think is to my detriment, I think that Pynchon might be best off read closer together, you really need to be in a specific frame of mind to truly connect and I might have taken too long and forgot a bit of that.
I’ve seen that many people call Vineland a Pynchon-lite novel, and while yes it’s probably easier to understand the point of the book, actually going through the book still isn’t the easiest thing in the world. For one after the first 70-odd pages the structure of the book takes on a life of its own as its tosses and turns into sub-plot after sub-plot. Reading it feels like falling through different realities with no warning, again and again and again. While Pynchon’s technique is pretty much flawless, I do think it gets bogged down at times, the stretch from around pages 200-300 slowed me right down and had me questioning if I’d ever get to the end of the book if it carried on like this. This is not a book you can be lazy with, take your eye off it even for a moment and there’s a very small chance you’ll be able to grasp it again without going back.
From what I can understand Pynchon characters are one of the main things he gets criticized for and unlike in V. or Gravity’s Rainbow, with this one I do agree the characters are kind of weak here. The kooky names are still here of course, but more than anywhere in his writing the people who populate this novel never feel like they go beyond the idea they stand for. Whether its Frenesi, Brock Vond, Weed Atman or even Zoyd as much as I do like him, the idea is clearly there for all this characters, but I’m not sure if the life is too. This is even to the point that I’ve thought that maybe that’s the point that’s trying to be made, that the soulless world which now stands in the aftermath of the failure of the 60s means people are no longer part of the living world and cannot become more than idea’s and slogans, which kind of lines up with Prairie since she’s about the only character who kind of does feel like there’s a little bit more to her, maybe this is Pynchon’s hope for the next generations potential to revive themselves and the world around them. Probably not though.
Prose-wise, for me, this is as good as any other Pynchon novel and some of the best of the late 20th century that I’ve ever read. All the trademarks of Pynchon that I’ve come to enjoy in the past are here, and this feels like Pynchon at his most comfortable, maybe not the most ambitious, but I’d like to think he truly felt at home in the process of writing Vineland. Here’s just one passage that especially stuck out to me: “I had enough trouble just accepting that she did it, I never figures out why. Just as well, it could have ate up my life. Maybe it did.” 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 the several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens labouring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat’s-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the underpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-stations oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath 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.”
Every single page of this book absolutely reeks of weed and paranoia. In fact, I’d say there’s a direct correlation between how much someone enjoys weed and how much their feelings towards this book. For me its not something that I like all too much, I hate the taste and it usually compels me to sleep after about 20 minutes, as did this novel at several points, however, I did not find it completely unpalatable. I’ve always struggled not just with Pynchon, but post-modern novels in general in that I’m either 100% getting and loving it or not a single thing is getting through and I rapidly tire and get bored, with this though I’m torn in the middle. I hope to read Mason & Dixon in the coming months while I’ve still got the Pynchon bug in my brain and see if I like that one better.
2.5/5
by marqueemoonchild