VL-IV: Random Thoughts

[Robin Landseadel]

I’ve been posting less than I might have [blessing or curse: you  
decide! ]There’s floating black spots in my left eye that distract me,  
but the black spots are going away slowly. I’m gonna have a mess  
o’spinach for the Lutine. TMI, perhaps, but we press on.

My first random thought concerning Vineland is how much plot we been  
pulled through, and how tightly that plot hangs together. Our group  
read is now around page 55. I’m up to page 73 on this trip [with a  
couple two-three side excursions to the end of the novel] and intend  
to fully race ahead in the next two days. I can see from this distance  
that there are mirrored plot and theme connections. In some ways this  
is the most structured of all of Pynchon’s books. There’s an amazing  
way the plot threads join together at the end of the book.

Salman Rushdie’s review of Vineland—”Still Crazy After All These  
Years”—is probably the most glowing of all the reviews issued forth  
from the mainstream press:

	. . .The novel begins with such a jump, and thereafter fragments

	into myriad different narrative shards (but, at the end, the pieces

	all leap off the floor and fit miraculously together, as if a film

	were being run backward).



http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/review_nyt_vineland.html

As a damn fine [po-mo] novelist Rushdie would note the weird  
structural integrity of Vineland, particularly considering that in  
Pynchon’s three previous novels we are left hanging [more or less] at  
the end of the story.

There is also that little issue of hope:

	. . .as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of

	the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter,

	funnier, more deadly. And most interesting of all this is that

	aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is

	not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested,

	might be another, and individuality, and family. These are the

	values the Nixon-Reagan era stole from the 60's and warped,

	aiming them back at America as weapons of control. They are

	values that ''Vineland'' seeks to recapture, by remembering

	what they meant before the dirt got thrown all over them, by

	recalling the beauty of Frenesi Gates before she turned.

There is an essential rootlessness in the characters of the three  
previous novels. Famlies are distant or disconnected. It’s interesting  
to note Pynchon’s residual fondness for “The Secret Integration” in  
his introduction to “Slow Learner”:

	. . .I had published a novel and thought I knew a thing or two,
	but for the first time I believe I was also beginning to shut up
	and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my
	eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American
	nonverbal reality. I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the
	places Kerouac had written about. These towns and Greyhound
	voices and fleabag hotels have found their way into this story,
	and I am pretty content with how it holds up.

	Not that it's perfect, understand, not by a long shot.

	The kids, for example, seem in some areas to be not very bright,
	certainly not a patch on the kids of the '80'S. I could also with an
	easy mind see axed much of the story's less responsible
	Surrealism. Still, there are parts of it I can't believe I wrote.
	Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of
	elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it.

Slow Learner, pg 22

That “company of elves” seems to be pointing to the sense of community— 
something akin to family ties—that one finds in the boys club in “The  
Secret Integration." This is amplified and rendered far sillier in the  
Chums of Chance. Family and community ties become more important in  
Vineland, in fact they become central in the last three novels.