Thoughts on Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland is a fun story about a teenager named Prairie. Oh, and some other stuff happens too.

Not where Vineland ranks in Thomas Pynchon’s bibliography, probably

Vineland is TV-inspired pulp fiction, and I don’t mean that as an insult. I love TV, I love pulp fiction, and I love Pulp Fiction [1994].

The great trick Thomas Pynchon pulls in Vineland is conning the reader into believing that this novel is more “accessible” than Gravity’s Rainbow because the prose is easier to read.

Unfortunately for anyone taking this book to the beach, this isn’t quite true.

What the hell happens in Vineland, anyway?

The plot of Vineland turns out to actually be a sort of frame story for a series of flashbacks and reminiscences, conveyed to either Prairie, the precocious teenager who is more or less the only protagonist, or seemingly to us, the readers. Some of these flashbacks and reminiscences, all about stuff that happened in Southern California in the 1960s or in Japan in a time period I can’t quite get a handle on, are narrated by characters who haven’t even been introduced within the novel’s actual plot yet.

Here’s the plot, which can be tricky to keep track of because the book keeps veering off into these backstories and side stories:

1. Zoyd Wheeler, ex-hippie, and his teenage daughter Prairie are living quirky lives in Vineland, a town in rural Northern California, in 1984. Prairie has never known her mother (Frenesi) and is desperate for information about her.

2. The plot’s inciting event: One day government agents from Zoyd’s past reappear and take over their home. As a result both Zoyd and Prairie are in danger, and Zoyd encourages Prairie to go into hiding by accompanying her metalhead boyfriend’s band to a San Francisco mob wedding gig (don’t ask).

3. At this wedding Prairie runs into a woman, DL, who used to be part of an underground film collective with Frenesi (and eventually it’s sort of implied she and Frenesi used to hook up). DL starts filling Prairie in on Frenesi. They head up to where DL lives, a place that’s sort of like a convent but for martial arts students, to hide from Prairie’s pursuers.

4. When the feds show up at the convent, DL and Prairie escape and race down to LA and hang out with some other former members of the underground film collective.

5. Turns out Brock Vond, the big bad fed who started all this, has bugged the home they’re hanging out in, and the feds are likely closing in. Prairie heads to the mall for some shoplifting with one of her childhood friends while the adults sort it out.

6. The feds destroy the underground film collective’s archives and occupy the home they were in, so Prairie, DL, and DL’s business partner decide to drive back to Vineland, where Frenesi’s family is having a family reunion.

7. Matter of fact everybody heads to Vineland, for various reasons (Frenesi got recruited to help make some kind of a movie up there, Frenesi’s mother Sasha heads up on impulse, etc.) And Zoyd apparently never left. Brock Vond is there too.

8. At the family reunion, Prairie finally meets Frenesi, and the meeting is mediated in maximum embarrassing fashion by Sasha, the grandmother. Various other people (like Zoyd and Frenesi’s current husband) meet each other as well. Not much happens as a result of Prairie and Frenesi’s meeting — “I think I make her nervous,” observes Prairie.

9. Prairie goes to sleep out in the woods and Brock Vond tries to kidnap her, descending from a helicopter and claiming to be her real father. But his federal funding gets cut right then and there, and he gets yanked back up into the sky by the helicopter returning to base.

10. Brock Vond steals a helicopter and tries to head back to Vineland, but instead he gets himself escorted to the Yurok land of the dead. Prairie goes out to the clearing where he nearly kidnapped her and seems to want him to come back.

All along, people are talking to Prairie or showing her film footage — all the flashbacks and reminiscences I was talking about earlier. These backstories help explain who the hell all these people are and why the hell they’re all acting this way. They also take up way more space in the novel than the actual present-day plot I’ve summarized above. They’re all out of order, too. No way am I going to go into all of them.

The novel becomes sort of like the Canterbury Tales, but for ex-hippies and people who watch too much TV. Citizen Kane [1941] is another pretty good comparison.

There are also stories within these stories, like this whole bit about sketchy tow truck operators Vato and Blood, who actually made an appearance somewhere back around main-plot point №2 and then also show up with a story of their own within another flashback. This story-within-a-flashback also involves an ex-bandmate of Zoyd’s to whom Zoyd spent some time reminiscing about Frenesi somewhere between main-plot points Nos. 1 and 2 and goddammit, Thomas.

In other words, there are stories nested within stories nested within stories, and many of the stories intersect with each other, even across nesting levels. If I were to chart it all out, it would look like goddamn Primer [2004].

But the whole time you’re reading, you’re thinking everything is easy to follow and out in the open, just because everything is wrapped up in nice friendly pop culture references, familiar antifascist paranoia, and readable narration.

Some of the plots and subplots are straight out of TV episodes and bad movies. You haven’t seen all of these TV episodes and bad movies, but you have. They’re floating around in the American cultural ether; Pynchon’s just channeling them.

So what’s the point of all this? Besides having some fun?

Smarter people than me have probably answered this question already, and I can’t get at the answers because I don’t have a JSTOR account.

But one of the main points is getting surprised by the moments when Pynchon rips into a description or an observation that leaves you breathless. He left-jabs at you with ridiculous plot, plot, plot, and then he hits you with the right hook:

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. That forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong [to use violence] because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.

It doesn’t matter who the “he” is in this passage (it’s a mathematics professor named “Weed” who becomes a 1960s revolutionary and the focal point of a personality cult — again, don’t ask), because this is very beautiful and sad and true and subversive.

Pynchon just sort of makes these observations in his fiction all the time and doesn’t really ever provide a prescription for fixing the problems they present. Another example:

“But we’re fighting the common enemy,” Rex protested [to BAAD, an African-American militant group]. “They’d just as soon kill us as you.” The BAAD contingent liked that one, and laughed merrily. “The Man’s gun don’t have no blond option on it, just automatic, semi-automatic, and black,” replied BAAD chief of staff Elliot X. “No! When the barricades are in the streets, we’ll be on the same side of them as you!” “Except that we don’t have the fuckin’ choice, we got to be there.” “That’s it, that’s just it! We’re choosing to stand with you.” “Uh, huh.”

In case you didn’t catch it (and you’ve read this far in an essay about a Thomas Pynchon book, so you probably did), this is an awesome explanation of what “white privilege” means, and why white privilege is a sad and immutable fact no matter how well-intentioned any individual white person is. Again, Pynchon doesn’t prescribe a fix or even pretend one is possible. He just knows it, and he wants you to know it too.

Vineland, sex, and sexism

This being a Pynchon novel, there is a tremendous amount of sex in it. I don’t mind sex, of course, but it hurts to watch such a subversive, anti-establishment author struggle to write female characters who don’t have sex with pretty much whoever wants them to. Plus there are some wince-inducing depictions of female sexuality in Vineland (as in much of Pynchon’s work), such as the moment when DL is breaking Frenesi out of a secret federal prison camp for hippies (don’t ask) and comes upon an unnamed woman masturbating in Frenesi’s unoccupied bed because she’s in love with Frenesi. I don’t know many women who would do something like that outside of a porno set.

In fact a lot of characters in the book are in love with Frenesi, but Frenesi herself is in lust with powerful uniformed men who carry weapons. This is a trait she shares with her mother, Sasha, an old-school leftist activist who also figures heavily into the plot. And thus two of the most important women in the book are reduced to symbols of the American people’s lust for fascism (Pynchon gets that right, because here we are stuck with trump).

Like with most 20th-century male authors, it’s hard to find fully human female characters in Pynchon. It’s just rough. There are plenty of women characters, to be sure, and I’m fairly certain the book passes the Bechdel test although I haven’t done the math on it, but I wish Pynchon would turn his subversive anger against the patriarchy from time to time.

But nobody’s perfect. Anyways.

Final thoughts: pulp fiction and fascism

Oddly, Vineland is set in 1984, six years prior to the book’s actual publication. All its paranoia about Reagan-era fascism therefore feels misplaced or outdated. If the American people had really become as fascist as Vineland implies by the year 1984, then the publication of Vineland wouldn’t have been allowed in 1990, right? Or maybe that contradiction is just one more narrative time loop, and a really meta one at that.

Or maybe the reader is supposed to stay stuck inside of this antifascist paranoia, eternally vigilant against those who want to take all the people they don’t like down the secret federal highways to the federal prison camps built in case of, say, “some urban evacuation.”

You know, like we did to Japanese-Americans during World War 2. Hmmm…

About that pulp fiction I mentioned at the top: Vineland has ninjas, assassination plots, mafiosos, characters jumping through plate glass windows, escaped lunatics, fast cars, bad jokes, secret plots, Godzilla references, life debts, drugs, sex, rock and roll, violence, intentionally phony depictions of Japanese culture, alien abductions, and hippie paranoia (which is inherently pulp-y). You have to buy in to a certain degree in order to enjoy it.

There’s also so much sugary cereal it’ll hurt your teeth to read about it.

And Thanatoids. Lots of Thanatoids. Don’t ask.