Another Blicero?

[Terrance]

The more the melodramatic language of Vineland casts Brock
Vond as a sadistic villain, the more the logic of the action
casts him as a partner in a dance of mutual courtship. Some
readers, taking the tone for the substance, have complained
that Brock and the other Justice Department heavies in
Vineland seem disappointingly tame when compared with the
real heavies who occupied the department under Nixon and
Reagan.

But like all literature that tries to make a moral argument,
Vineland sees little point in placing blame on 
those who are unlikely ever to
read it. It tries to discomfort its readers, 
first by agreeing with their
self-satisfied sense that their unhappiness is the result of
others'actions, then by quietly demonstrating that the
actions that most afflict them are their own. The 1960s
radicals (and the peaceful apolitical potsmokers whom
Pynchon treats with sentimental affection)
do not even have the satisfaction of defeating Brock Vond,
who is defeated by his own side. Ronald Reagan, like a
half-conscious deus ex machina, wakes from a dream and, by
cutting Vond's budget, interrupts him in mid-villainy. 

Pynchon 's vision is sacramental but not otherworldly.
Instead of looking away from this world to one somewhere
else, he looks for the hidden order and significance of the
world he lives in. Vineland's sacramental geography is a
vision of a sacred place, the fictional Vineland County in
northern California, the place that Zoyd Wheeler comes to
recognize as a harbor of refuge, "Vineland the Good." This
visionary Vineland occupies the real geography of the
California coast from Crescent City to Eureka and the
redwood forests nearby. But its name hints that it is an
epiphany of  that thousand-year-old alternate
America founded by Norse sailors, who, unlike the sailors
who founded the America we live in, never conquered  the
land or usurped its indigenous people. (p. 44) 


In these final chapters all the book's generations of the
living gather for another reunion, one that joins the
families of Frenesi Gates'sgrandparents. The older members
of these two families are Wobblies and Hollywood
left-wingers, bearers of a heritage
of an alternate and unofficial America. Pynchon treats this
alternate tradition as a matriarchal one: the novel traces
the ancestry of all its women characters while treating the
men as if they sprang directly from the earth. Frenesi's
hatred for her newborn daughter, 
and voluntary separation from her soon
afterward, violates that
matriarchal line, just as her murderous entanglement with
Brock Vond is a sign of what the book's historical myth
regards as the betrayal of the true alternate America by the
1960s left.  After so thorough a betrayal no return or
recovery can ever be complete. All of Pynchon 's books are
permeated by one or two central ideas: entropy in V., the
manifestation of the sacred in The Crying of Lot 49, and the
bureaucratization of charisma, as described by Max Weber, in
Gravity's Rainbow. In Vineland the central idea is less
abstract than in the earlier books. A fall into an era
without life or death, followed by a return to human time,
is less a concept than a parable of personal experience. It
describes in visionary terms a phase that can occur in
anyone's life when all significant relations and events seem
baffingly distant and inaccessible.  
What makes this vision luminous (to use
Pynchon's word of praise) in
Vineland is not the tendentious historical myth that
attaches to it, but its intensely personal quality Zoyd
Wheeler's years of separation from his wife are his years in
a realm without time, when he dreams of an impossible
return. But he comesto recognize those same
years as the ones in which he learned
to value his daughter and their shared 
harbor in Vineland. This part of the
narrative, lightly sketched in
the margins of the brightly  colored central plot, reads
like an allegory of a lived
experience of loss and renewal.  For all its silliness and
longueurs, Vineland is the most troubling and exuberant
work  of American fiction to appear in many years. 

Edward Mendelson, "Levity's Rainbow," in The New Republic,
Vol. 203,  Nos. 2 & 3, July 9 & 16, 1990, pp. 40-6.