Vineland the good.

[rich]

one branching of this Vineland tree I think would be California--no
other place gets as much attention I think in Mr P's work--heck, even
a trilogy of sorts with IV coming down the pike.
There's something about the place personally, artistically that
inspires him to write about it
California as metaphor for promise and despair, communal love-ins and
waste, home to large defense and military industrial complex and local
pot growers, police brutality and cult killings, Brian Wilson and
Charles Manson, etc.
If Vineland represents the good, what can one call is opposite in a
Californian context--Californication?

as Tull once sang Thinking Out Loud
Rich

On 2/18/09, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> I just had a thought that seems worth sounding out.  Perhaps
> Vineland's unique place in TRP's body of work  has to do with his
> closeness to it. Some define the novel as fiction of its own time;
> Buddhists define the navel similarly, but by that definition( which I
> 1st heard in some Am. lit class) VL and CoL49 are his only novels. Is
> it possible that P is handling something he is close to with extra
> tenderness and hope. By setting the story in 1984 he is asking us
> where America is going and his closeness to the subject causes him to
> handle it with more restraint and focus, perhaps less literary
> playfulness. If so it may speak in a special way about his hopes for
> his own country.
>
>
>