Vineland
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| Vineland | |
 1st edition cover |
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| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown |
| Publication date | 1990 |
| Media type | print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 385 pp |
| ISBN | 0-316-72444-0 |
| Preceded by | Slow Learner |
| Followed by | Mason & Dixon |
Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern tale of life[citation needed] set in the United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election.[1] Its central locale is Vineland, California, a fictional small town in California's Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon Boonville).
The novel describes fascist traits as related to the Nixonian repression, and its culmination in the War on drugs.[1][2] The novel comments on the slide from the free spirit of the sixties to the fascist eighties.
Contents |
[edit] Title
The title Vineland may be a play on the word "Hollywood", a reference to the first Viking settlement in North America, Vinland, or a reference to Andrey Vinelander, a character in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Still others contend that the title refers to Vineland, New Jersey or a "Vinland the Good" mentioned in a Frank O'Hara poem. However, the most obvious explanation is that the title is a reference to the area in which the novel is set, which is near California's grapevine-filled Wine Country.
[edit] Reviews
The novel received varied reviews and a mixed reception from readers. One reviewer stated:
- ...such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized. [1]
[edit] Technique
Throughout the novel, Pynchon's technique is recognizable. From a cameo of Mucho Maas (from The Crying of Lot 49) to a bizarre episode hinting at Godzilla, Pynchon's "zaniness" pervades the novel. For example, Pynchon laces the book with Star Trek references. He has his characters watch a sitcom named Say, Jim, about a starship all of whose officers "were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled, redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara." The numerous references to films rigorously include the year of release in a manner unusual for a work of fiction. Several characters are Thanatoids, victims of karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state of being "like death, only different."
| “ | When your mother stops giving head to stray dogs.(p.274) | ” |
In addition, the novel is replete with female ninjas, astrologers, marijuana smokers, television addicts, musical interludes (including the theme song of The Smurfs) and, naturally, metaphors drawn from Star Trek.
[edit] External links
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Ken Knabb (2002) Raptor, Rapist, Rapture: The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
- ^ Vineland, p.71
[edit] References
- ^ Pynchon, Thomas R. Vineland. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
- ^ Rushdie, Salman. "Still Crazy After All Those Years", The New York Times 14 January 1990.
- ^ Geddes, Dan. "Pynchon's Vineland: The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State", The Satirist
- ^ Gordon, Andrew. "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir". The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.
- ^ Thoreen, David. “The President's Emergency War Powers And The Erosion Of Civil Liberties In Pynchon's Vineland”, Oklahoma City University Law Review 24, No. 3 (1999).
- ^ John Diebold and Michael Goodwin: Babies of Wackiness, a "reader's guide to Vineland"
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