Plot
The story is set in California in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's reelection. [6] 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 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 federal 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 1960s, during the height of the hippie era, the fictional College of the Surf (in equally fictional Trasero County, said to be between Orange County and San Diego County in Southern California) seceded from the U.S. and became the People's Republic of Rock and Roll (PR³), a nation of hippies and dope smokers. Brock 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).
Frenesi flees after her betrayal, 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, and Hector are all searching for her, with 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 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 its 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. Brock immediately 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.
Critical reception
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." [9] Salman Rushdie wrote a favorable review in The New York Times upon the book's release, calling it "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." [10]
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 less comprehensible. [11] Brad Leithauser concurred, writing in The New York Review of Books 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. [12] 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 Republican America. [13]
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", [14] 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." [15] Edward Mendelson's review in The New Republic was mostly favorable; he found the plot tangled and tedious but praised Pynchon's "intellectual and imaginative energy" and called the book "a visionary tale" whose world was "richer and more various than the world of almost any American novel in recent memory." He also commended its "comic extravagance", writing, "no other American writer moves so smoothly and swiftly between the extremes of high and low style." [16]
Mendelson additionally noted that Vineland was more integrated with its emotions and feelings than Pynchon's previous novels, [16] and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader that it was the author's most hopeful work yet. [17] That hopefulness was also mentioned by Rushdie, who believed the book suggested community, individuality, and family as counterweights to the repressive Nixon–Reagan era, [10] 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. [18] Contrarily, Rushdie found that the shocking final scene lent itself to a morally ambiguous ending and felt the novel expertly held a balance between light and dark throughout. [10]
