Suggestions (Gale Online 5 Vl.)

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Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

    The publication of Gravity's Rainbow marked the beginning of a
seventeen-year silence interrupted only by the 1984 release of Slow
Learner, a collection of five previously-published short stories. In
1990, however, Pynchon reentered the literary mainstream with Vineland,
a novel taking its title from the fictional northern California county
in which it takes place. Focusing on a group of 1960s beatniks after
they lived through the disillusionment of the following decade into the
television-dominated culture of the 1980s, Vineland features a
pot-growing handyman, landscaper, and former rock singer named Zoyd
Wheeler, his teenaged daughter Prairie, and Frenesi Gates, his ex-wife.
The book's complex plot begins with Zoyd's being forced into hiding when
a prosecutor from Washington D.C. (and Frenesi's jealous former lover)
tries to kidnap Prairie in an attempt to resume his relationship with
Frenesi, who has disappeared. Unlike Pynchon's previous novels, Vineland
contains numerous references to popular culture and alludes to many
fewer scholarly, literary, or historical ideas. Critics trace, however,
Pynchon's trademark themes of entropy and paranoia, and many comment on
the wit, humor, and extraordinary facility with language that Pynchon
demonstrates in the novel.
    While finding much about Vineland to praise, reviewers generally
agree that Pynchon's much-anticipated novel does not surpass either
Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49 as his best work. "Vineland
won't inspire the same sort of fanatic loyalty and enthusiasm that
Gravity's Rainbow did," asserts David Strietfeld in Fame, who quips,
"The new novel has got a much more mainstream flavor. . . . Call it
Pynchon Lite." Expressing severe criticism is Listener's John Dugdale,
who feels that Vineland's grounding in contemporary American life
detracts from the importance of Pynchon's themes: "[Vineland] is an
unsatisfactory, stripped-down novel lacking the internal tension which
sustained its predecessors: the interplay between abstract concepts and
human stories, past art and modern lives, the scholarly and the
streetwise. By misguidedly choosing to quit the literature of ideas,
Pynchon robs his writing of both its vitality and its distinctiveness."
But Paul Gray, writing in Time, is more appreciative of Vineland and its
portrait of betrayal, conformity, materialism, and shallowness: "It is,
admittedly, disquieting to find a major author drawing cultural
sustenance from The Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy instead of The Odyssey
and the Bible. But to condemn Pynchon for this strategy is to confuse
the author with his characters. He is a gifted man with anti-elitist
sympathies. Like some fairly big names in innovative fiction, including
Flaubert, Joyce and Faulkner, Pynchon writes about people who would not
be able to read the books in which they appear. As a contemporary bonus,
Pynchon's folks would not even be interested in trying. That is part of
the sadness and the hilarity of this exhilarating novel."
    (continued)

Source: Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.