VLVL2 (1): Supplementary Materials and Reviews

[Tim Strzechowski]

Sorry, meant to include this on the previous post:

Salmon Rushdie, "Still Crazy After All These Years." Jan. 14, 1990
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-vineland.html

[...]

"It's 1984 in Vineland County, in northern California. Dates really matter in this book. Even the movies come with dates attached: ''Return of the Jedi (1983),'' ''Friday the 13th (1980)'' (''Everybody was Jason that year''), ''Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961),'' ''Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956).'' We're talking mass culture here, and mall culture, too, because this is a 1984 flowing with designer seltzer ''by Alaia and Blass and Yves,'' and the malls have names like Noir Center (as in film noir) and the mall rats have names like Che. And, in this 1984 that Orwell could never have imagined, the skies contain marauders who can remove people from commercial airliners in midair, and a research lab belonging to a ''shadowy world conglomerate'' named Chipco can be stomped into Totality, flattened beneath a gigantic and inexplicable animal footprint, size 20,000 or thereabouts. This 1984 is also Ronald Reagan's re-election year, and that, for all the leftover hippies and 60's activists and survivors and casualties, could mean it's time for the ''last roundup.'' 

[...]
"There is enough in ''Vineland'' to obsess the true, mainlining Pynchomane for a goodly time. One could consider, for example, the significance of the letter V in Mr. Pynchon's oeuvre. His novel ''V.'' was actually V-shaped, two narratives zeroing in on a point, and ''Gravity's Rainbow'' was the flight path of a V-2 rocket, a deadly parabola that could also be described as an inverted V. And here's the letter again - what does it mean? - with all the death imagery in this novel, with its use of old Amerindian death myths. Are we being told that America in 1984 is in fact the land of the dead, V-land, the universe beyond the zero? One could do a number of further riffs on the more allegorical of the names: Weed - marijuana, and Atman - soul; and, hey, Frenesi turns out to be an anagram of ''free'' and ''sin,'' the two sides of her nature, light and dark, just as the hero of ''Gravity's Rainbow,'' Tyrone Slothrop, could be made to reveal his essence anagrammatically, turning into ''sloth or entropy.'' Sure, it's still working, that ole anagrammar. 

"But what is perhaps most interesting, finally, about Mr. Pynchon's new novel is what is different about it. What is interesting is the willingness with which he addresses, directly, the political development of the United States, and the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition many generations and decades older than flower power. There is a marvelously telling moment when Brock Vond's brainchild, his school for subversion in which lefties are re-educated and turned into tools of the state, is closed down because in Reagan's America the young think like that to begin with, they don't need re-education. 

"What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of the Greed Decade, that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years. And as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly. And most interesting of all this is that aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and individuality, and family. These are the values the Nixon-Reagan era stole from the 60's and warped, aiming them back at America as weapons of control. They are values that ''Vineland'' seeks to recapture, by remembering what they meant before the dirt got thrown all over them, by recalling the beauty of Frenesi Gates before she turned. "

[...]





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