Holding up a mirror...

[Mike Weaver]

>Any text that can be considered "ambiguous" achieves this ambiguity by
>   presenting both sides of a particular situation and giving the reader 
> little
>   or no bearings for how s/he should resolve the ambiguity.

>...we've established that he may be viewed either as an ex-hippie... 
>content to "get by" with minimal effort...
>On the other hand, we've also established that he is also a sell-out to 
>the government and its economics...

The problem I have with this is that I can find no ambiguity to be 
resolved. There is no ambiguous situation with two sides, there are 
characters who are bundles of contradictions like so many of us. Whitman's 
multitudes.

It does seem to me that Zoyd is a well realised character, and the way he 
has been judged on this list reflects an awful lot on the particular 
readers and their cultural closeness to, or distance from, his kind and 
their environment.
I come from a rural area of the UK which might well be compared in its 
cultural/environmental mix to Vineland: forestry, fishing and farming the 
traditional industries, surfers, bikers and hippies the main subcultures, 
small cities, smaller towns and villages with spiderwebs of roads and lanes 
connecting them. I was a teenager in the late 60s and lost contact with the 
area after 1984. When I read Vineland I recognise the characters as  just 
the kind of people I knew through that time, and the ways they get by 
typical of a rural area of seasonal and intermittent employment. The whole 
thread deeming RC and Moonpie to be exploiting child labour is absurd to me 
who grew up helping on the farm from when I was big enough to call the cows 
or heft a bale of straw. It's a way of life where work and play merge at 
many points.
So I'd guess that the readers who found Zoyd and his friends so wanting in 
so many ways to be townies through and through.

Vineland may be convoluted in structure but I'm not sure it can be called a 
post-modernist novel. Touches of magic realism yes but that aside if you 
disentangled the flashbacks and allowed for the filtering of perspectives 
through different characters and their biases, what would you have but a 
modern(ist?) family saga and political/philosophical fable. This may be one 
of the reasons why reviewers thought it weak.  
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