Vineland
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- This article is about the novel. For towns of the same name, see Vineland, Minnesota and Vineland, New Jersey. For the Viking colony, see Vinland.
Vineland_book.jpg
Vineland is a 1990 book by Thomas Pynchon. Like most of Pynchon's work, it is postmodern. The book's subject matter is hippies living in Boonville, California, a small town in California's Anderson Valley. Some say the title, Vineland is a play on the word "Hollywood." Others contend that the title refers to the first Viking civilization of Vinland in North America. Still others contend that the title refers to Vineland, New Jersey, the hometown of Patti Smith.
Vineland disappointed the many critics and readers who waited almost twenty years since Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. In contrast to Pynchon's earlier works, Vineland was overtly political and polemical, as if Pynchon, disgusted with Reaganomics, penned an angry modern adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, one reviewer argues,
- But 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. Template:Ref
Politics aside, Pynchon's technique is still 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. Some readers contend that Vineland, unlike what its detractors argue, does not take itself seriously enough to be leftist propaganda.
See also
References and links
Template:Note Pynchon, Thomas R. Vineland. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990). Template:Note Geddes, Dan. "Pynchon's Vineland: The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State (http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Vineland.html)", The Satirist Template:Note Thoreen, David. “The President's Emergency War Powers And The Erosion Of Civil Liberties In Pynchon's Vineland (http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm)”, Oklahoma City University Law Review 24, No. 3 (1999).