Date Finished: January 17th 2020

Continuing on the theme of favourite authors, after having read China Mieville’s Iron Council at the end of 2019 and Zadie Smith’s NW as a literary starting pistol for 2020, I decided to opt for a read from a third favourite author – the favourite author – to keep the ball rolling. It’s the postmodern madman, the reclusive literary giant, Ruggles himself: Thomas Pynchon.

Vineland had me laughing in the first paragraph and chuckling throughout the first chapter. To begin with, there’s an easiness to Vineland that seems to contrast with the rest of Pynchon’s work; it’s very chilled out in its early chapters in spite of the undercurrent of madness running through it. However, the novel soon changes tack, becoming a labyrinthine Russian doll of reminiscences seguing into one another, linking past to present and, I have to confess, I started to get lost in this confusion of backstory.

“He thought, At least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open….”

Time has taught that our reaction to art is not a strict thing. It’s easy to encounter a work at the wrong time and totally dismiss it when it actually has wisdom for you, or to read something at the right term, the stars aligning in a way that makes a work transcendent when at a different time you might find it banal. Vineland I approached at the wrong time. Pynchon demands a certain amount of cognitive bandwidth that I just didn’t have at this time, and I forced myself through a work I wasn’t fully present to appreciate. Nevertheless, I do think it’s the weakest work I’ve read for him so far: some of its wackiness seems forced, its ending resolves a little too neatly and quickly – a bit “fuck it, that’ll do” – and at times it feels a little like a pretender to Pynchon rather than the real deal.

“After a while her thoughts started falling into place. The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many times gone unanswered – she began to see them more directly, not as world history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty, one by one against other living humans. Maybe we all had to submit to History, she figured, maybe not – but refusing to take shit from some named and specified source – well, it might be a different story.”

That said, there are soaring moments, Frenesi and DL in Mexico, the escape from PREP, DL and Takeshi’s changing relationship, and many scenes of wistful nostalgia. At its heart, it’s a juxtaposition of ’60s radical optimism against the harsh reality of Reagan’s America in the ’80s. It feels a more personal work, perhaps more autobiographical in nature, although proving that is hard due to Pynchon’s reclusiveness, however, a wonderful article in Vulture, On the Thomas Pynchon Trail, collects rumours about the errant author into a speculative biography that does share some parallels with the general thrust of the plot. It’s interesting to see Pynchon tackle the topic of family, as it’s something quite absent frommany of his works (and it’s suggested in the aforementioned article that this is because Pynchon had a fairly fraught relationship with his own family, but slowly reconnected when he settled down with a wife and child in later life). There’s still ambivalence and caveats, but Pynchon seems to settle on the idea that family is one of the few things that can beat Them.

“We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.”

Vineland isn’t by any means Thomas Pynchon at his best, but it nevertheless showcases many aspects of his talents and shows an intriguing evolution in his style and themes. It is, if anything, a transitional work; one that bridges the gap between the postmodern mania of Gravity’s Rainbow and the more linear ‘Pynchon-lite’ fun of later novels like Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. As with all of Pynchon’s work it will merit a reread in years to come, and I’m sure that will reveal unexplored depths and further excellence. Until then, I have to say that Vineland is my least favourite Pynchon to date, but there’s no such thing as bad Pynchon.

7.5/10