Vineland

[Murthy Yenamandra]

I'd like to add to the support being rounded up for Vineland. I have to
admit that I finally read it this February, having been given so many
lukewarm impressions of it by friends and strangers otherwise partial
to Pynchon. I was quite stunned as to how good it was, and the best
part is that I still haven't "figured out" what all is going on in that
book. I agree with Andrew Dinn that it's quite underdetermined compared
to GR (although it can be better compared to V. in its ambiguity). I
still keep thinking about formulating my thoughts about it in a post to
pynchon-l so I might get some answers, but haven't progressed that far
yet.

One thing that he tries to do, I think, is to explore what happened to
the sixties - in the popular mythology those were the good times that
simply came to an end with people moving on to other things - but he
tries to see what those people moved on to and understand how it came to
be that way. He also tries to bring into focus who They were in the
sixties and if They remained the same in the 80s and what exactly is the
dynamic operating between Them and the society - whether there was
anything left afterwards which was not Them - the last seduction, so to
speak.

I think people have some trouble appreciating it as compared to GR
because most Pynchon readers are too involved with the sixties to see
it clearly from the inside - or perhaps its insights are too obvious to
them or may be clearly wrong-headed. In the interest of full disclosure,
I should mention that I was born in '68 in a quite different part of
the world, so the sixties were more or less part of the mythology for
me and not as personally close as to most people on the list.

Anyway, what I mean to say is that one could do a lot worse than reading
(or rereading) Vineland while waiting for Pynchon's next. I certainly
intend to do so.

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. Email: yenamand at cs.umn.edu
   "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
    swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the
    wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour  
    to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all ..."