Vineland underrated

[Terrance]

John Carvill wrote:
> 
> On 24  Sep 2003 15:50:06 joeallonby wrote:
> >Who is it that you feel is underrating Vineland?
> 
> Well Mr Bloom for one, who called Vineland 'a disaster'.



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."