Vineland by Thomas Pynchon REVIEW 

7 years after you left this comment… it looks like PTA is finally making Vineland!

this comment is 7 years old, but care to elaborate on what you mean by it exactly?

@@JD-ve6kn He was just really annoying on twitter for a while lol

ah okay, as a teen i voraciously read all of BEE's stuff but have never been a twitter user hence my curiosity haha

They're all in the same universe. The Pynchverse.

The more you know! Nice!

It’s my favorite, too.

Ditto

Really? Never heard about the theory! I see the affinity in theme between the two, but Vineland looks to me to be very specifically about the 60s and what followed them, and Against the Day ends way before that! But I can see how they might have come from the same core idea ;)

@@TheBookchemist Recently re-read this. Curious, since you love Against the Day (and it's my favorite!) what you think of Vineland as a sequel to the Traverse family saga! It is odd to speak of a sequel that was published over a decade before the thing it is sequel-ing. But I was just incredibly delighted to see this continuation! (To refresh: Frenesi, and thus Prairie, are of the Traverse line. Frenesi's grandfather is Jess. There are a handful of passages, notably in the beginning, with a quick character bio of Jess, whom we "last saw" as a young man at the end of Against the Day. The political lineage of the Traverse line is dealt with several times & the climax of the book is during a massive Traverse family reunion...and Jess has a concluding dinner speech that, when thinking of his own grandfather Webb, had me tears!) Re: Vineland itself, I agree that it's got a serious sense of political grief, but it's almost underdone by its comic sensibilities; in some ways, this might be seen as a fault or weakness, but I also think the novel is in many ways like a "Tube show" & so it traffics in some tropes. While I think Pynchon is not as angry here as he can be, I also think that makes a lot of sense: 1990, the year it came out, is also the year he got married, and became a bit more of a family man. As you know, he can be so tender about family relationships. :) So I think it's lack of ire is sometimes undermining the subject: the translation of imperial counterinsurgency tactics deployed on U.S. citizens, the birth of neolibralism, the legacy of mass resistance entering the '80s & becoming nihilistic...etc., so forth. At the same time, I do think this is when Pynchon himself was changing, maybe becoming a little more tender-hearted. Finally, I do think, for all its possible faults, Vineland is frequently, frequently funny...sometimes maybe even funnier than Inherent Vice!

I read the first half of it in a flash as soon as the book came out, but found it so disappointing I had to stop. As a long time (!) Franzen fan, it read like a bad imitation of Franzen. I'd still love to finish it before the end of the year, but we'll see how that goes.

Well, I can say that it certainly becomes more interesting as the book goes along, and I can't compare it to any other Franzen having not read any others by him, but I found the last 80 pages pretty tedious and unsatisfying. I wouldn't say that it's something you necessarily have to finish if you're familiar with his style and you still don't enjoy it.

Alas the one big advice I can give you about it is to try and not spread it over too much time. What I mean is, the book is full to the brim with characters (really, dozens and dozens), and some of them appear at one point and go away for 400 pages and then come back in a prominent role; and if you read the book over too much time, you might have completely forgotten about them by the time they come back. Some people take notes about the name and features of key characters; or more simply, you can browse back past chapters of the book if you're confused about who a specific person is. What I can tell you is that it's immensely entertaining and very rewarding, and not difficult at all (much less than Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon), it's just so so very long!

He does have an impossibly amazing oeuvre :) and the more you read and re-read his stuff the better it gets. All fair points by the way, I too read some pretty nasty Vineland reviews dating back to its publications (some by other American writers whose names will not be mentioned, but who ripped Pynchon off spectacularly in their own production) and yeah, they overall feel kinda ridiculous now.

I've been reading a new book called "Occupy Pynchon" by Sean Carswell that examines Pynchon's work from Vineland onward. Very interesting read so far, I think you would dig it.

You shouldn't be, Gravity's Rainbow and Lot 49 aside I'd say that the rest of his stuff reads easier than Vineland.

I read it a long time ago, it's a book people love to hate but no matter what, it's a great novel. I might film a video about it sometime in the future but first I'd need to re-read it I think ;)

Heard him mentioned, but never read anything of his! Takeshi was probably my favorite character :)

Nope! I still have to read both that one and Slow Learner - hopefully before the year's over!

I like Auster a lot! His biggest misfortune I think is that, you know, some authors are hate-them-or-love-them, while he seems to me to be the very opposite of that. His books are hugely enjoyable, terribly clever, but I still wouldn't put him among my favorites. But maybe I'm too harsh, both In the Country of the Last Things and the Music of Chance are dope and the New York Trilogy is, well, a must-read. Thanks for the kind words man!

Never read him, although I knew a guy who was doing a PhD about his fiction! The only Indian author I've read is Salman Rushdie I think - thanks for the recommendation :)

You're gonna beat me for sure man, I don't even own V! And I have Slow Learner to read first, and lots of stuff in the way before I get there ;)

I'm sure you'll love it ^^ lots of people seem to!

I found the very first chapters very funny, but the whole flashback about that one college in the 60s and Brock's involvement with Frenesi, well, it took the fun out of the rest of the book in a way. I did find the parts about family very uplifting - perhaps though my problem is that I come from his later production, where he explores these topics much more in depth. Now that I think about it, if you compare Vineland to Gravity's Rainbow, of course it's ten times more optimistic and uplifting. I too hope he'll gift us with another one! I agree with a scholar called Michael Huehls that he's gonna write a Civil War novel - it's the one stretch of American history he's never explored before.

you'll get it when you're older.

Don't think so lol

To each his own I guess

You might end up loving it!, but yeah, I'd stuggest you move to either Inherent Vice or Against the Day or Gravity's Rainbow, depending on how brave you feel on a 1 to 3 range.

I've been reading Pynchon chronologically, and I'm a huge fan of V. as well. Much as it's a long, difficult read, Gravity's Rainbow would be a good follow-up in that a lot of the characters introduced in V. return in GR!

V. was my first pynchon , and I'm reading inherent vice now, will pick up GR next. I'm quite afraid of GR, seems to loom ominously😂 I'm really loving inherent vice though, I'm trying to build a resistance for all the obscurity in Pynchon, hopefully by the time I read GR I'm super comfortable