Vineland

The story is set in California in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election. After a scene in which former hippie Zoyd Wheeler dives through a window, something he is required to do yearly to keep receiving mental disability checks, the action of the novel opens with the resurfacing of federal agent Brock Vond, who (through a platoon of agents) forces Zoyd and his 14-year-old daughter Prairie out of their house. They hide from Brock, and from Hector Zuñiga (a drug-enforcement federale from Zoyd's past, who Zoyd suspects is in cahoots with Brock) with old friends of Zoyd's. Soon, Prairie accompanies her boyfriend Isaiah Two Four to a Mob wedding, where she runs into DL Chastain, a ninjette and former family friend who, recognizing Prairie, explains Brock's motivation for coming after the Wheeler family.

This hinges heavily on Frenesi Gates, Prairie's mother, whom she has not seen since she was an infant. In the '60s, during the height of the hippie era, the fictive College of the Surf (located in equally fictive Trasero County, said to be located between Orange County and San Diego County in Southern California) seceded from the United States and became its own nation of hippies and dope smokers, called the People's Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³). Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor, intends to bring down PR³, and finds a willing accomplice in Frenesi. She is a member of 24fps, a militant film collective (another member of which, Ditzah, is telling Prairie the story in the present), that seeks to document the "fascists'" transgressions against freedom and hippie ideals. Frenesi is uncontrollably attracted to Brock and ends up working as a double agent to bring about the killing of the de facto leader of PR³, Weed Atman (a mathematics professor who accidentally became the subject of a cult of personality).

Her betrayal caused Frenesi to flee, and she has been living in witness protection with Brock's help up until the present day. Now she has disappeared. The membership of 24fps, Brock Vond, and Hector Zuñiga are all searching for her, for their various motives. The book's theme of the ubiquity of television (or the Tube) comes to a head when Hector, a Tube addict who has actually not been working with Brock, finds funding to create his pet project of a movie telling the story of the depraved sixties, with Frenesi Gates as the director, and the pomp and circumstance surrounding this big-money deal create a net of safety that allows Frenesi to come out of hiding. 24fps finds her and achieves their goal of allowing Prairie to meet her, at an enormous reunion of Frenesi's family, the Traverses and Beckers (including one elder, Jess Traverse, who is a child in Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day). Meanwhile, DL Chastain and Takeshi Fumimota, her partner in "karma adjustment," are hanging out with Weed Atman and other Thanatoids—people who are in a state that is "like death, but different," when they hear the news about Brock.

Brock, nearly omnipotent with D.E.A. funds, finds Prairie with a surveillance helicopter, and tries to snatch her up, claiming that he, not Zoyd, is really her father, but while he is hovering above her from a cable, the government abruptly cuts all his funding due to a loss of interest in funding the war on drugs because people have begun playing along willingly with the antidrug ideal, and his partner, Roscoe, flies the helicopter away. Immediately, Brock tries to take the helicopter back to Vineland by force, but he is ostensibly killed during his attempt, with Pynchon metaphorically describing his journey "across the river" with tow-truck drivers Blood and Vato, whom he calls to help get his "car" unstuck. Meanwhile, the family reunion and the Thanatoid bar celebrate news of Brock's disappearance, and the book ends with Prairie returning to the spot where Brock tried to abduct her, hoping for him to come back and get her after all.

Vineland polarized critics at the time of its release. Author Tobias Meinel asserted in a 2013 essay that the novel "has led many critics to focus on its shift in style and content and to read it either as 'Pynchon Lite' or as a critical commentary on contemporary American culture."{{Cite journal |jstor = 43485900|title = A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland" and Reading in the Age of Television|last1 = Meinel|first1 = Tobias|journal = Amerikastudien |year = 2013|volume = 58|issue = 3|pages = 451–464}} Salman Rushdie wrote a positive review in The New York Times following the book's 1990 release, praising it as "free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with." He called it "that rarest of birds" that, "at the end of the Greed Decade," is "a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years." Although he praised Pynchon's light-yet-deadly touch at tackling the nightmares of the present rather than the past, Rushdie acknowledged that the book "either grabs you or it doesn't."{{Cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-vineland.html|title=Still Crazy After All These Years|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Salman Rushdie|author-link=Salman Rushdie|date=January 14, 1990|work=The New York Times}}

British literary critic Frank Kermode was disappointed by the book, feeling that it lacked the "beautiful ontological suspense" of The Crying of Lot 49 or the "extended fictive virtuosity" of Gravity's Rainbow. He did acknowledge that it was "recognisably from the same workshop" as Pynchon's previous outings but found it to be more incomprehensible.{{Cite journal|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/frank-kermode/that-was-another-planet|title=That Was Another Planet|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Frank Kermode|author-link=Frank Kermode|date=February 8, 1990|journal=London Review of Books|volume=12 |issue=3 }} Brad Leithauser concurred, writing in The New Yorker that Vineland was "a loosely packed grab bag of a book" that recalled what was weakest about the author's canon and failed to extend or improve upon it.{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/03/15/any-place-you-want/|title=Any Place You Want|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Brad Leithauser|author-link=Brad Leithauser|date=March 15, 1990|magazine=The New Yorker}} In the Chicago Tribune, James McManus posited that while inveterate Pynchon readers likely would unfavorably compare the book to Gravity's Rainbow, it was a manageable book with strong prose that succeeded as an arch and blackly amusing assault on the desires of Republican America.{{Cite web|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-01-14-9001040211-story.html|title=Pynchon's Return|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=James McManus|author-link=James McManus|date=January 14, 1990|work=The Chicago Tribune}}

Film critic Terrence Rafferty admired the novel, and in The New Yorker called it "the oldest story in the world—the original sin and the exile from Paradise,"Cowart, David. {{Google books|N1sE5VSi2ncC&pg|Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History|page=105}} but author Sean Carswell later contended that aside from Rafferty and Rushdie, initial reviews of Vineland "run the gamut from slightly miffed to outright hostile."Carswell, Sean. {{Google books|WlvCDgAAQBAJ&pg|Occupy Pynchon: Politics After Gravity's Rainbow|page=5}} Edward Mendelson's review in The New Republic was mostly positive, however; although he found the plot to be tangled and tedious, he praised Pynchon's "intellectual and imaginative energy" and called the work "a visionary tale" whose world was "richer and more various than the world of almost any American novel in recent memory." He also commended the book's "comic extravagance," claiming that "no other American writer moves so smoothly and swiftly between the extremes of high and low style."{{Cite magazine|url=http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/VinelandReview1990.pdf|title=Levity's Rainbow|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Edward Mendelson|author-link=Edward Mendelson|date=July 9, 1990|magazine=The New Republic}}

Mendelson additionally noted that Vineland was more integrated with its emotions and feelings than Pynchon's previous novels, and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader that it was the author's most hopeful work yet.{{Cite web|url=https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/reading-pynchons-prayer/Content?oid=875320|title=Reading: Pynchon's Prayer|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Jonathan Rosenbaum|author-link=Jonathan Rosenbaum|date=March 8, 1990|work=Chicago Reader}} That hopefulness was also mentioned by Rushdie, who believed that the book suggested community, individuality, and family as counterweights to the repressive Nixon-Reagan era, but Dan Geddes opined in 2005 in The Satirist that the book's "happy ending" was surprising, given its overarching warning about a growing police state.{{Cite web|url=https://www.thesatirist.com/books/Vineland.html#_Toc66380614|title=Pynchon's Vineland: The War on Drugs and the Coming Police-State|access-date=April 12, 2020|author=Dan Geddes|date=January 3, 2005|work=The Satirist}} Contrarily, Rushdie found that the shocking final scene lent itself to a morally ambiguous ending, and he felt that the novel expertly held a balance between light and dark throughout its entire duration.

Paul Thomas Anderson has spoken many times of his love for, and desire to adapt, the novel.{{Cite web |last=Erickson |first=Steve |date=Jan 26, 2015 |title=Paul Thomas Anderson & the Cinema of Outcasts |url=https://lamag.com/film/paul-thomas-anderson-cinema-outcasts |access-date=April 11, 2024 |website=Los Angeles Magazine |quote=Vineland is really near the top for me.}}{{Cite web |date=December 11, 2014 |title=Paul Thomas Anderson interview: 'It was like getting the keys to your dad's car' |url=https://www.timeout.com/film/paul-thomas-anderson-interview-it-was-like-getting-the-keys-to-your-dads-car |access-date=April 11, 2024 |website=Time Out |quote=I’d wanted to adapt Vineland, but I never had the courage.}}{{Cite web |last=Kermode |first=Mark |date=December 28, 2014 |title=Paul Thomas Anderson: 'Inherent Vice is like a sweet, dripping aching for the past' |url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/28/paul-thomas-anderson-intereview-inherent-vice-mark-kermode |access-date=April 11, 2024 |website=The Guardian |quote=I am a gigantic Pynchon fan and I’d long had this dance in my mind where I’d be thinking about doing Vineland or Mason & Dixon. But those would have been impossible tasks.}} In early 2024, Anderson began filming a new project, with Leonardo DiCaprio portraying what some fans speculated to be role of Zoyd Wheeler.{{Cite web |last=Rindner |first=Grant |date=2024-03-22 |title=Is Paul Thomas Anderson's Mysterious, Big-Budget New Leonardo DiCaprio Film an IMAX Thomas Pynchon Movie? |url=https://www.gq.com/story/is-paul-thomas-andersons-mysterious-big-budget-new-leonardo-dicaprio-film-an-imax-thomas-pynchon-movie |access-date=2024-04-11 |website=GQ |language=en-US}} After the film was shown in a test screening, it was confirmed that the film is loosely based on Vineland, but in a contemporary setting.{{Cite web |last=Raup |first=Jordan |date=2025-01-24 |title=Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another Test Screens, Confirmed to Be Modern Update on Vineland |url=https://thefilmstage.com/paul-thomas-andersons-one-battle-after-another-test-screens-confirmed-to-be-modern-update-on-vineland/ |access-date=2025-01-26 |website=thefilmstage.com |language=en-US}} The film, One Battle After Another, is scheduled for release in September 2025.

{{Notelist}}

{{Reflist}}

• {{cite book |last=Cowart |first=David |editor1-last=Dalsgaard |editor1-first=Inger H. |editor2-last=Herman |editor2-first=Luc |editor3-last=McHale |editor3-first=Brian |editor3-link=Brian McHale |date=March 2012 |chapter=Pynchon in literary history |pages=83–96 |chapter-url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-thomas-pynchon/issues/5D3EC0EE848355C60912469EDD76603A |chapter-url-access=subscription |title=The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon |series=Cambridge Companions to Literature |edition=online |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/CCOL9780521769747 |isbn=978-1-139-01986-6 }}
• Ken Knabb (2002) [http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html Raptor, Rapist, Rapture: The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland]
• Patell, Cyrus R. K. (2001) [https://books.google.com/books?id=VLaMgwBxZ1kC Negative liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the problem of liberal ideology]

• {{note|Vineland}} Pynchon, Thomas R. Vineland. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
• {{note|Rushdie}} Rushdie, Salman. "[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/review_nyt_vineland.html Still Crazy After All Those Years]", The New York Times January 14, 1990.
• {{note|Geddes}} Geddes, Dan. "[http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Vineland.html Pynchon's Vineland: The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State]", The Satirist
• {{note|Gordon}} Gordon, Andrew. "[http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080509135818/http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm |date=May 9, 2008 }}". The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167–178.
• {{note|Thoreen}} Thoreen, David. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20101116080155/http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm 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).
• {{note|Diebold & Goodwin}} John Diebold and Michael Goodwin: [http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/ Babies of Wackiness], a "reader's guide to Vineland"

• [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ Vineland Wiki]
• [http://thomaspynchon.com/pynchon-cover-art/vineland/ Vineland Cover Art Over Time @ ThomasPynchon.com]

{{Thomas Pynchon}}

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Category:1990 American novels

Category:Novels by Thomas Pynchon

Category:Fictional populated places in California

Category:Novels set in California

Category:Mendocino County, California

Category:Postmodern novels

Category:Fiction set in 1984