Thomas Pynchon

Zoyd Wheeler's old nemesis arrives in Vineland hoping to use Zoyd's daughter as a pawn to track down Zoyd's ex-wife

Vineland

“Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. . . . Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture—spy thrillers, ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies—Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.”

:/ i didnt like this :/ misogynistic and wacky in a stupid way

yasi

Roman

It's not as good as his other stuff, but the antagonist is named Brock Vond - which is pretty funny

Nick Whalen

Gavin

Didn't get it, first time through anyway.

Anthony Sabourin

Coalesces nicely in the end, otherwise kind of reminded me of a Robert Ludlum book? Pynchon Power Rankings are thus:

1 - Gravity's Rainbow
2 - Crying of Lot 49
3 - Mason & Dixon
4 - Vineland
5 - Inherent Vice
6 - Against the Day

The drop-off from 3 to 4 is a doozy, rilly.

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).

zilver 

the only thing i’m looking to get from the lectures about this thing is understanding

Christopher Rankin

Adrian minckley

nicola

Jacob Reader

Juan Sacco

Ex-hippie and unemployed FBI sting specialist Frenesi Gates must confront her past when former commune-mates start disappearing and an old lover turns up after fifteen years

Colton Ray

Maurice FitzGerald

Vladimir

Muriel Trystero

Ture Strange Nilsson

Bee 

Donald

Ian MacDonald

Hsin-Hao Yu

Pedro Soares

A group of Americans in Northern California in 1984 are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times -- sexual and political -- which have refused to die. Among them is Zoyd Wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past.An old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, storms into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Soon Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, go into hiding while Vond begins a relationship with Zoyd's ex-wife and uses Prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she had.Part daytime drama, part political thriller, Vineland is a strange evocation of a twentieth-century America headed for a less than harmonic future. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Vineland

Reviews

Highlights