Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[Carvill John]

>The progressive political viewpoint in Vineland, as presented through the 
>story of Frenesi and
>her family history, was the best part of the book.  The other pop-culture 
>TV, Japanese martial
>arts, Cheech and Chong type sections were trite and uninteresting by 
>comparison.

I would have agreed with that statement after my first reading, with maybe a 
small plea for the Zoyd/California episodes. I especially thought the 
Japanese section was superfluous, but on the second reading I really enjoyed 
those bits. For some reason, when I think of that part of the book I always 
remember this:

"By the time his life brought him here, down in the reeking beast-print, the 
hazy red, green, and yellow lights and striped barricades, the struggling in 
the mud and rain after a mystery that might at the end be only as simple as 
greed, become at least independent, though Professor Wawazume still kept 
sending a lot of business his way, no more corporate pin on his suit lapel, 
only the buttonhole unadorned, lordless, his one fixed address now a cubicle 
in outer Ueno he shared rent on, containing an armored file cabinet, a 
telephone, and the signed, framed photo of himself the Professor had given 
him when he left to go out on his own (an enlarged paparazzo shot, the 
Professor looking even more goofy than usual, lurching after a noted beauty 
in gold lame, flip hairdo, and two-centimeter eyelashes outside a bar in 
Shinjuku, a lucent string of drool begun to descend from one corner of his 
mouth), Takeshi had already long been a nomad in the sky's desert, 
continuing to depart in kerosene fumes to seek another connection in another 
Pacific port, to nod to faces he had last seen coming out of the Yat Fat 
Building in Des Vœux Road, to check the body of the stewardess and what he 
could see out the window of the body of the airplane, and at last, when they 
began to lift, to commend himself to the gods of the sky."


A classic example of one of Pynchon's massively long sentences, displaying 
the 'nested clauses' that someone earlier today mentioned. There's a lot to 
enjoy in this one quote, to maybe point to as examples of Pynchon's 
particular genius, but what made it stick so firmly in my mind was the 
humour - that "lucent string of drool" especially.

Cheers
JC