If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this
latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an
excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as
Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49
and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's
something of a disappointment. Yes, it's compulsively funny, full
of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social
commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of
post-Sixties malaise - a sense of characters being more than an
accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its
winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment
of apparently unintentional kitsch - a limp scene reuniting a girl
and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in
1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really,
but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods
for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex.
At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but.
A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the
rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform,
the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose
manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights
over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by
his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation
expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile,
the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd
Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland,
the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick
their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the
heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free
America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant
digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The
People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living
dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of
Pynchon's eye-popping language. Pynchon's latest should prove to
the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough
to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned
through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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 Musil Story), and
illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar
scene in V.).
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