VLVL2 (1): Supplementary Materials and Reviews

[joeallonby]

I loved this review when it came out. How Pynchon appropriate to have the
author in hiding write the review of the new novel by the author in hiding.

on 7/11/03 11:58 PM, Tim Strzechowski at dedalus204 at comcast.net wrote:

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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