Vineland is downplayed by Pynchon fans and completely ignored by curious newbies, who tend to pass over it in favour either of the big-game status of one of his doorstop meganovels, or of the appealing slenderness of The Crying of Lot 49. Shame. All his gifts and his mysteries are on display here, wrapped up in one of his most enjoyable, inexplicable, and lushly all-enveloping plots. Rereading it now, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s terribly underrated.The essential storyline, if there is...

Pop culture is evil and the opiate of the masses so Vineland is Thomas Pynchon’s sardonic and idiosyncratic attack on pop culture.It ain’t that I don’ have Hollywood connections. I know Ernie Triggerman. Yeah and Ernie’s been waiting years for the big Nostalgia Wave to move along to the sixties, which according to his demographics is the best time most people from back then are ever going to have in their life – sad for them maybe, but not for the picture business. Our dream, Ernie’s and mine, i...

So when you think of Pynchon you think of serious work, right? And trudgery and difficulty and obfuscation and pedanticism, and like this dizzying thing that just makes you feel unintellectual and slow for never being able to catch up, right? Well if that is the case, you have never read Vineland . Because oh. my. god. This book is so fucking good.I'm not going to try to summarize or anything, because this book is too sprawling and reeling, and anyway that would be an afront to its amazingnes...

This is without a doubt one of the most insane books ever written, even by Pynchon's standards this is something else, the characters are bonkers, the story if you could call it that is nuts!, not a lot makes sense, the writing feels schizophrenic, there are moments that could have come from things such as, James Bond, Tarantino, Asian ninja flicks, cartoons, the hippie movement, 80's action B-movies, spirituality and a whole lot more. The one thing that's in it's favour is the fact it was just

The novel transports him back to California, the country he has often visited, even lived in, but which still seems like a dream, everything too vivid, too distinct, too much to be real, the Pacific viewed from halfway up a mountain, separated into bands progressing from aquamarine to eggshell, sea transformed into sky in a series of gradations as precise as the steps in a theorem, the ever-present background hum of violence occasionally coalescing into tangible form, raised voices from the lobb...

Pynchon's most underrated, I think - a bighearted, funky read; a worthy 3rd "V" book.

If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about and individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?I was conflicted with this book. I hated the first half but the second half brought everything home for me. It's a typical Pynchon story with all of his tropes. Everything from weird names, too many characters to keep track

"...everybody's a hero at least once, maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland I first read Vineland about 25+ years. It was my sophomore year in college. I was idealistic and I met this guy in the college bookstore named Thomas Pynchon. Since it was my FIRST (or was The Crying of Lot 49 my first?) Pynchon, I think I missed way more than I gained (except for the desire for MORE Pynchon). Looking back now, Pynchon for me starts to divide into his BIG GREAT novels and his f...

Everybody always told me Vineland was Pynchon’s worst effort - what? No way no how, brothers and sisters, this here is an endless DNA chain or like Russian doll of embedded story after story descending and re-emerging through various strata of narratorial layers, pop culture send-ups, genre parodies, all funny as hell and twisted and ridiculous while also extremely smart and painted with mind-tweaking flights down and up imaginative spiral staircases! And there’s so much heart in this book this

If Three Should Be FiveI first read “Vineland” some time in the 90’s. Based on an imperfect recollection of it, I rated it three stars when I joined GoodReads. I’ve raised my rating to five stars, partly because of how much fun I had reading it a second time.I can’t think of a better novel to read between now and when we emerge safely into the Post-Trump era. Reprise and Foreshadow“Vineland” reprises the longing and quest for an absent woman that was at the heart of “V” (in this case, the da...

I don’t usually finish a book and start a review in the same breath. But I also don’t usually allow myself to read more than one of an author’s works within a calendar year (many books, little time, etc. -- though of course Stephen King would be this year’s other exception because the Tower, all things yield to it): T. Ruggs, you magnificant bastard, I hope you know how many personal rules I’m violating because you’re the first time since auspiciously picking up my first collection of Bukowski p...

Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits...A ginormous set of characters stomping around Northern California and beyond, doing weird shit as the national culture shifts its goalposts around them. Zoyd leaps through windows, more a symbolic penance than any true means of escape. Hector is so addicted to television that it's impossible to know what he knows to be true and what's an invention of his deluded mind. Frenesi is a sn...

Pynchonian zaniness + fibrous nutrition at the sentence level + fun to read + hermeneutical-political + leaving plenty of lacunae in immediate comprehension to commit intellectual effervescence, not to mention I’m of an age to not to have to look up most of the cultural references.

I had a preconceived notion of what just how good Vineland would be before I read it. My opinions about the book have been influenced by numerous accounts of how weak it was. After having read everything that preceded Pynchon's fourth novel, it's still difficult for me to wholeheartedly disagree, even though I thoroughly enjoyed some parts of it. It made me laugh...but even though I wasn't an avid fan when it was published in 1990, I still couldn't help wonder why this was the book that Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow is the flashy intellectual you date for a few months before discovering his/her pretensions to be vaguely problematic long-term; Vineland (like Zoyd) is the partner you keep around for while, who cuddles you at night and makes fancy herbal tea. I'll stay friends with Gravity's Rainbow always, but Vineland hit me really hard and my allegiance is to the latter - as a more accessible, beautifully-written but nonetheless still-Deleuzian brain fuck of healthy proportions.

I've now read all of Pynchon's novels. I have Slow Learner: Early Stories heading my way from the library, and then there's nothing else left but to re-read them all again. Which I will probably do, over and over, for the rest of my life.I'll admit that Vineland took me a minute to get into, but once I did, I really enjoyed the world spun up in its pages. It's obviously "minor" Pynchon, or "Pynchon-lite" as coined by Michiko Kakutani in her review of Bleeding Edge, but in some ways, that is a wo...

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D5iB...Unjustly considered a happy-go-lucky slapstick comedy of a novel, Vineland is in fact quite dark and bitter in its potrait of what went wrong with the 60s. There's humor, sure, but lots of capital E Evil too. A novel of ideas more than character, more I think than any other Pynchon's, it might work well as a starting point for those looking to pop their Pynchon cherry, although I still believe Inherent Vice works better.

While not for me his strongest book, Vineland shows very Pychonian characters trying to work out their relationships to each other. There is even a big Hollywood style ending (probably a pastiche/parody) to the story. I found that the backdrop was less the chaos and anarchy that I appreciated in Gravity's Rainbow, Mason&Dixon and Against the Day and so I appreciated this one less than those. I would put it low in the Pychon canon but still suggest that it is worth reading for his insights into C...

I really hate the “Pynchon-lite” classification. Sure, the common gripe people have with this thing is that it’s not the mind-blowing encyclopedic trip we love from the guy, but he’s doing a different thing here.Pynchon’s take on popular culture, family, and generational dynamics is just as brilliant as anything he’s ever done, and let’s face it, anything directly following GR (especially after such a long hiatus) was doomed in terms of critical reception. Not just for completists, this is one o...

In, "Against the Day", Pynchon describes "prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America's wardens could not tolerate," and Vineland is one of these visions. In luscious, lyrical beauty, this novel lays out Pynchon's idealistic portrait of what America might have been, and then explores how this vision was subverted, the weaknesses in this vision that always existed, to be exploited by governments and corporations, denied and destroyed. To me, Vineland is both the most hopefu...

Vineland is a concise response to everyone who has criticised Pynchon for weak characterisation. Not without merit, mind you. In previous, more conceptually heavy works - Gravity's Rainbow being a brilliant but notorious offender - individual personae are sidelined, providing him with the latitude to flex his conceptual and thematic muscles. If you're a fan of the man's work, you know this is where he fires on all cylinders, operating as arguably the strongest prose stylist currently living. But...

Yes, perhaps my favourite book of all time, cos like Charles Dickens's Hard Times, it embodies an entire structure of feeling (industrial England/post-Fordist-post-1968 America respectively) and makes you laugh and feel while also making you doubt and think. Unlike Hard Times (which I nevertheless love to bits), it doesn't lecture at you re: precisely what to attitudes to adopt about any of that (OK, other than that whole Nixon-Reagan axis of meanness angle). Rather it bestrews all kinds of juic...

Re-read. Goddamn this is a glorious book. For all the wackiness, I'd say this is the first time Pynchon lays bare his true humanism without obfuscating it behind oblique language. It's just a big shaggy dog of a story and I can't say enough good things about it. Anyone that compares it to V., GR, M&D, or AtD is an idiot that knocks it for not going epic-scale. Take it for what it is: a sweet little book about family, and the shifting definitions that word has come to encompass.

This novel is great, and I’m glad that I decided to read it again. Although often described as ‘Pynchon-lite’, I think this novel is more in the tradition of Pynchon’s great works than it's often credited as being, and I think it’s been under-appreciated.The plot of Vineland is nominally about the search for Frenesi Gates. The themes of Vineland are nominally connected to the end of the hippie movement, and the birth of Reaganite politics. But the book is also about so much more. Like most Pynch...

Reread 24.09.2018- 07.10.2018I'm learning that Pynchon is only better the second time around. Against the Day next? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------So that's it for my third Pynchon. Coming down from a sort of high after reading Mason & Dixon about a month ago, I had pretty high expectiations going into this one. Well, what's it all about? As usual Pynchon has a lot of sub-plots going on, characters disappearing and then coming back into the story ag...

«Watch the paranoia, please!»This was my third go at trying to gradually voyage through Pynchon's oeuvre, having read Lot 49 and Inherent Vice before. Based on the immediate impression, Vineland is probably my least favorite of the three, but that's not to say there aren't countless diamonds hidden along the pages of this book. The story is set in Northern California in 1984, in the midst of the Reagan era, and is largely an elegy for the late 60s countercultural movement. We follow numerous cha...

For as big of a fall from Pynchon's first three novels as it is, and for as massive as an improvement as follow-ups were, it's hard to really stay mad at Vineland. While V. and The Crying of Lot 49 were fine novels in their own right, they also seem to function as lead-ups to Gravity's Rainbow, far and away the peak of early-period Pynchon, and arguably all of Pynchon's career, although Mason and Dixon puts up a good challenge in that regard. After you've hit your peak, where is there to go but

Dazed and ConfusedAm I now a part of the Establishment? You know, too instep with The Man, man. Or maybe I've lost too many brain cells on some mean partying long ago to truly get Pynchon. I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice and now Vineland. Only the first one could I not stand--what, with its shit-eating grins [literally], its patent pedophilia and insane incest.Reading Vineland--and to a lesser degree Inherent Vice--is like being dropped into a time and place, being surrounded by a mul...

I’ve been doing a reread of Pynchon during these times mostly spent indoors. Embarrassing that I had never read Vineland. I am so glad I did. Damn it was good.

This is going to be a tough review. This is one of those books that people go ape over. But I’m not quite sure why. I usually think that I’m just not quite smart enough. Or maybe it has more to do with being intellectual than smart if you have any idea what the difference is!Someplace I read that this is the story of a 14-year-old girl searching for her mother who abandoned her at some early time in her life. I suppose that is possible. Aren’t we all searching for some thing sometime in our live...