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FICTION/Pynchon, Thomas
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Published
Boston : Little, Brown c1990.
Language
English
Main Author
Thomas Pynchon (-)
Physical Description
385 p.
ISBN
9780141180632
9780316724449
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

Pynchon's first novel since Gravity's Rainbow (CH, Jun'73) was well worth the wait. Vineland, a large, sprawling novel, investigates the death of the spirit of the American 1960s, a time of supposed innocence, purity, and revolution. The question Pynchon poses is perhaps asked best by a television-crazed policeman named Hector Zuniga: "Who was saved?" The novel pursues the fortunes of casualties like Zoyd Wheeler, his wife Frenesi Gates, their daughter Prairie, and their friend the "ninjette" D.L. Chastain, trapped in a web of paranoia and betrayal, chased for nefarious and mysterious purposes by Brock Vond, allied with the FBI, CIA, and who knows what. Pynchon plays with a shifting kaleidoscope of characters and intertwining plots, but they are all tightly controlled and they all revolve back to a coherent center. Pynchon's style is what we have come to expect--pulsing sentences crammed with imagery and the crass detritus of pop culture. He is also just as funny as ever. Vineland is a major work by a major American novelist, and its conclusion seems to indicate that perhaps Pynchon is not quite so pessimistic about America as his earlier work might have led us to believe. Recommended for academic and public libraries. -M. H. Begnal, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Set in Northern California in 1984 and peopled with quirky characters, Pynchon's latest is a series of brilliant set pieces eventually overwhelmed by its own frenzied exuberance. 200,000 first printing. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Pynchon's first novel since the formidable Gravity's Rainbow (1973) more closely resembles his earlier work, especially The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). (In fact Mucho Maas, the ex-husband of Lot 49 's heroine, reappears in the new book.) 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. ). Pynchon fans have waited 17 years for this novel, and they won't be disappointed. An essential purchase.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch . Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.