VLVL: Holding up a mirror...

[Don Corathers]

The past couple days of discussion suggest that Pynchon's text is a highly
reflective surface--that each reader finds in Vineland a political meaning
cast in his or her own image (except for Keith, who apparently is both
contrarian and pessimist). If that's true, the book is an extraordinary
achievement in fiction for that reason alone.

This thread of the conversation has been going on, in various forms, since
the beginning of the reading, and I'm sure it will be with us to the end.
I'm wondering if, to lay a sort of foundation for the next few months of
wasted bandwidth, we can find anything that most of us can agree on about
the book's political coordinates.

For example, and to cast the net as wide as I can throw it, can we agree
that the author disapproves of Brock Vond's conduct? (For the purposes of
this discussion, I'm assuming we've all been to the end of the book and back
at least once.)

Don