VINELAND
Thomas Pynchon
New York: Little, Brown, 1990
385 pp., $19.95
The publication Vineland is at least a minor literary event. Whether the book pleases or disappoints readers, particularly Pynchon's devoted followers, its appearance is significant; for this is the first novel by the mysterious author since Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. (Slow Learner, from 1984, was a collection of previously published stories.) Almost seventeen years is a long time to wait for new fiction from and author whose previous works - V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow - captivated many with their ingenious, technically challenging, and haunting comic/apocalyptic tales of characters in pursuit of what appear to be vast, conspiratorial forces directing contemporary history to a dark end. These novels, at once rowdy and prophetic, fascinated and teased their readers with the promise of a key to (or at least an apt metaphor for) the destructiveness of the twentieth century. With Vineland, Pynchon's long silence is over. This alone guarantees that the novel will be widely read and discusses.
The novel may well have a larger significance. Its similarities to Pynchon's earlier books throw an interesting light on the cast of mind informing the novels that jade famous the author whose anonymity is something of a legend. (There are no published photographs of Pynchon as an adult; friends and literary agents loyally guard his whereabouts; he himself gives no interviews.) Furthermore, what is different about Vineland may say something not only about the changes in its author's attitudes but also about the changes occurring in America's cultural climate over the last twenty-five years. Pynchon has been a shaper and bellwether of themes to be found among those who see themselves as progressive or even avant-garde; this book is not an exception, though the initial response to it from reviewers and admires may, I suspect, suggest otherwise.
Vintage Pynchon
For readers of Pynchon's earlier novels, much about Vineland is familiar territory. Pynchon has always been fond of tracking the peregrinations of one of life's losers as a way of leading into the revelation of something far too big and sinister for the hapless figure to defeat. The aimless wanderings of ex-sailor Benny Profane make up much of the present-time action of his first novel, V.
In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, not herself disadvantage, comes upon an underground of life's rejects. In Gravity's Rainbow, the utterly hapless Tyrone Slothrop is pursued by a shadowy group of nefarious forces representing scientific energy twisted to the service of death. Moreover, his novels favor a dual time structure, one set of actions from the past merging at last with a plot line in the present to create a sense of historical movement (usually toward some catastrophic condition). Herbert Stencil, Jr., tracks the successive appearances of a mysterious woman who surfaces at moments of international crisis from the late nineteenth century to World War II; her progressive dehumanization charts the century's decline into chaotic violence. Through flashbacks on various minor characters in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon again plots the cultural death wish leading to World War II. Lot 49, a novella, remains a partial exception; it has a
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