Vineland

Infobox Book |
name = Vineland
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = 1997 Penguin Classics cover
author = Thomas Pynchon
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Little, Brown
release_date = 1990
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages = 385 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-316-72444-0
preceded_by = Slow Learner
followed_by = Mason & Dixon

"Vineland" is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern tale of life in the 1980s United States. Its central locale is Vineland, California, a fictional small town in California's Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon Boonville). The title "Vineland" may be a play on the word "Hollywood", a reference to the first Viking settlement in North America, Vinland, or a reference to Andrey Vinelander, a character in Vladimir Nabokov's "". Still others contend that the title refers to Vineland, New Jersey or a "Vinland the Good" mentioned in a Frank O'Hara poem. However, the most obvious explanation is that the title is a reference to the area in which the novel is set, which is near California's grapevine-filled Wine Country.

"Vineland" disappointed many critics and readers who waited almost twenty years since "Gravity's Rainbow" in 1973Fact|date=January 2008. In contrast to Pynchon's earlier works, "Vineland" was seen as overtly political and polemical, as if Pynchon, disgusted with Reaganomics, penned an angry modern adaptation of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four."Fact|date=January 2008 On the other hand, one reviewer argues,

:...such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in "Gravity's Rainbow," is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of "Vineland" and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in "Vineland" something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized. ref|Thoreen

Others note, however, that the novel is as relentless in its satire of representatives of the counterculture and oppositional movements as it is of government authority and agents.Fact|date=January 2008

Politics aside, Pynchon's technique is still recognizable: from a cameo of Mucho Maas (from "The Crying of Lot 49") to a bizarre episode hinting at Godzilla, Pynchon's "zaniness" pervades the novel. For example, Pynchon laces the book with "Star Trek" references: he has his characters watch a sitcom named "Say, Jim," about a starship all of whose officers "were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled white redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara." The numerous references to films rigorously include the year of release in a manner unusual for a work of fiction. Several characters are Thanatoids, victims of karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state of being "like death, only different". In addition, the novel is replete with female ninjas, astrologers, marijuana smokers, television addicts, musical interludes (including the theme song of "The Smurfs") and, naturally, metaphors drawn from "Star Trek."

References and links

* [http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/ "Vineland" wiki]
* Pynchon, Thomas R. "Vineland." (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
* Rushdie, Salman. " [http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/rushdie--vineland.html Still Crazy After All Those Years] ", "The New York Times" 14 January 1990.
* Geddes, Dan. " [http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Vineland.html Pynchon's "Vineland:" The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State] ", "The Satirist"
* Gordon, Andrew. " [http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir] ". "The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel," ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.
* Thoreen, David. “ [http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm The President's Emergency War Powers And The Erosion Of Civil Liberties In Pynchon's Vineland] ”, "Oklahoma City University Law Review" 24, No. 3 (1999).
* John Diebold and Michael Goodwin: [http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/ "Babies of Wackiness"] , a "reader's guide to "Vineland"