Vineland and the Death of the 60s

[gary webb]

I've sort of been stuck on what has been so called Pynchon's California
novels... in particular I've been re-reading Vineland... the whole Frenesi,
24fps, Brock Vond, death of Weed Atman, and the collapse of PR3... Pynchon
is writing about a sort of failed revolution or maybe not even revolution,
and it is interesting that he is using the medium of film to document it
all, to be followed circa 1984 with the ubiquitous Tube... I didn't really
give the death of Weed Atman much thought in my first reading of the novel,
but it is really pretty strong writing, after reading Bleeding Edge and
Inherent Vice... Gravity's Rainbow, even though it is set in WWII, still
reads like someone coming to grips with the fallout of what was going on
during the 1960s, the is a sense of Paradise Lost about the whole book...
Vineland is written by someone who never really forgot the promise that was
floated so liberally, someone who had come out of hiding, to tell us where
we've been and why, even though I think Pynchon was more or less
acclimating himself, married and child, settled down for all practical
purposes, but I still plugged into that moment, maybe a little more
cynical, older, wiser, etc. This is just my interpretation... Gravity's
Rainbow is a big novel, and there are many threads of meaning... but
somehow in my mind, Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland have some sort of
strange link, not necessarily in content or publication chronology, but
maybe one is an Inferno of sorts and the other is a sort of Paradise, where
in Vineland one gets a sense that the demons that plagued Pynchon earlier
in his career, had somehow been exorcised and reconciled with, during a 17
year silence...
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