Vineland review

[Paul DiFilippo]

Here's an old review of VINELAND by John Clute, reprinted from
the Brit magazine Interzone (May 1990) in JC's new book,
LOOK AT THE EVIDENCE.
A pynchon note.  _Vineland_ (Little Brown, 1990) hAs come into
the world on the cusp of 1990, without benefit of proofs to hoard,
advance copies to study for trace-marks of Inferno.  It will be
loved by some and dismissed by others.  Those who love it will
aste the coils of interregnum in its refusal to face past 1984
into the second term of Mr Reagan (I loved it); those who dismiss
it will find the paranoid linkages of its plot either trivial or
dumb, the nostalgia it seems to express for the 1960s simply
reflecting the middle-agedness of its author, over 50 now, no
surprise the axons are beginning to sputter and fail, the
old Pynchon brain beginning to mispell the old linkages that tied
America into knots he cannot now compute, old Pynchon aping
the abysmal melancholy of his prime, _Vineland_ repeating
_Gravity's Rainbow_ (1973) as farce.  But maybe that is only to 
say that Pynchon knows whereof it is possible, at the moment, 
ti speak.  _Vineland_ is a tale of the time, which is a time
waiting.  It is about the badlands, the vertigo-inducing,
spasm-wraced decorticated American human heart caught in the 
entrails of the rat-trap cusp no kairos can illuminate.  It is
about the exhaustion of those who wait.  It is also an
extraoridnarily funny book.
     Zoyd Wheeler has gone to earth in Vineland, a small city
in northern California, and until 1984 he has been safe, though 
monitored.  A clan of Thanatoids or living dead also marks time in
Vineland, mirroring the belatedness of his condition, the only
time kept being the tick-tock ageing of his meat-puppet body.  
Suddenly the old world begins to connect him in again,like a 
torture deferred.  The tale is complex, though it can be
traced through; but this is only a note.  Suffice it that Zoyd
has long ago lost his wife Frenesi to the ownership of those
who bought the 1960s, who turned the hippies into operatives; and 
that now Frenesi has dodged even Brock Vond, the owner-rep who 
had the run of her body for more than a decade.  Vond now wants
to obtain her daughter Prairie, who has been raised by Zoyd.
Zoyd sends her into hiding, and himself diappears for most of the
rest of the book, most of which compromises a dense and skittish 
epistemological probing of Frenesi's long irradiation in time's
net, in "the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos
in the hinterlands of time that stretched so somberly inland from
the honky-tonk coast of Now."  At the end, for a moment, Vond is 
defeated--more accurately, he is annulled by a givernment diktat--
and children are seen playing, families gathering at dawn or dusk
around their RVs, Zoyd shrugging off a long-anticipated meeting
with Frenesi; a moment of piece most precious to flotsam.  And
the book is done.  It has not stepped over.  It is about waiting.
It has not trespassed forward, through time's arroyos, to the 
oil-slicked coast.
    Wise wise _Vineland_, so to stop.
***
Paul, again.  All typoes mine.

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