Vineland underrated

[Ghetta Life]

>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>
>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'.

Does anyone have access to Bloom's review (did he write one?)?  If so could 
it be posted here?

>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.

It doesn't even come close.

>"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

Paul Gray set's up a straw man above, a false criticism of the reader's 
expecting "high art" references instead of pop-culture in Pynchon's books.  
He knocks over the straw man and thus, he thinks, redeems Vineland as an 
"exhilarating novel."  Sorry, but Vineland isn't that exhilarating, at least 
not for me, and it's not because it's a short book.  It's a disappointing 
work of prose.  Part of what makes Pynchon's writing so great in GR is his 
luscious and complex descriptions of places and situations, starting with 
the pitch dark crystal cathedral collapse, continuing with the greenhouse on 
the roof, and so on.  Nothing so beautiful exists in Vineland (but he 
returns to this strength in M&D).  Everything in Vineland seems to be 
shorthand, especially the characters.  Vineland represents a low-point in 
Pynchon's mature writings.

Ghetta

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