Peter Coviello: Vineland Reread

[bulb at vheissu.net]

Happy New Year!

 

Anyone seen this one? Publication month January 2021.  Ordering for Europe
is through John Wiley so it will take ages before it arrives as they don't
have it on stock today.

 

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/vineland-reread/9780231185219

 

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon's
return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity's
Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However,
for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of
thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in
the rough currents of history.

Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads
Pynchon's offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite
summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of
heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of
failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving
meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the
fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police,
Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of
late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from
visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he
discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon's
harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a
model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

 

Michel.