DYING ON THE VINE: THOMAS PYNCHON & VINELAND

Here and there, this is a wonderful book. In the traffic-jam poetry of an occasional sentence, in the skewed framing of an occasional insight, and in the bruising strangeness of two or three scenes along the way, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel achieves the manic greatness of his earlier work. And Pynchon’s essential sympathies appear unchanged. The author of V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) once more celebrates marginal figures who fight back against a power-mad conspiracy. As before, the struggle is a quest, and the guerrilla tactics owe as much to Chaplin as to Ho Chi Minh; as before, the most humane element that the good guys find in the enemy organization is a grim sexual need.

This time, however, Pynchon works closer to home than in his three previous novels. The new one sorts through a few singed ’60s vets and their broken lives, mostly in contemporary Northern California. In coming down to earth, this way, the rocketman hasn’t exactly lost his tailfins. Still, he’s not flying anymore. For all its fingertip detail and small-potato heroism, Vineland is ordinary in its conception and sentimental in its conclusions. The man behind the book may be a genius, but the work itself brings to light the rawness and intermittence of that genius.

Vineland‘s situation pulls its author into line with the likes of Tom Robbins and Jim Dodge, the milk-and-cookies iconoclasts. Vineland begins with Zoyd Wheeler, the warmest and fuzziest of its aging countercultural types. It’s 1984, a year so freighted with significance as to break a man’s back, and Wheeler in fact suffers a disability. His however is mental, a nuttiness that keeps him on California’s payroll, happily at home amid the slackers of the pot country up around Humboldt County. The initial suspense has to do with Zoyd’s rummaging around after some crazy public act that will guarantee the checks keep coming. An altogether sane rummaging, to be sure: our hero suffers nothing worse than cynicism and laziness.¹ But the psychotic show he puts on brings both his ex-wife and the man who stole her away crashing back into his life. The wife is the blue-eyed Frenesi Gates, the seducer the black-suited Brock Vond.

If my description emphasizes the couple’s surfaces, alas, so does Pynchon’s. The superficiality of the ex-wife reflects a more general problem for this author, a problem I’ll get to in a moment. As for Brock Vond, he’s a cartoon villain—by choice, clearly—and it works. A freelancer for the Department of Justice, Vond can call on regimental levels of ordnance; he sets Zoyd hustling to cover both his own ass and that of his teenage daughter by Frenesi, Prairie. It’s a cartoon but it works, as the usual Pynchonian gas keeps the balloons afloat. There’s the offhand insight into time and class (these Klam-ath-Range towns are starting to gentrify), the pleasing dissonance of high rhetoric and gutter talk, the sneaky technical know-how and the sheer head-banging improbability. Then not quite a hundred pages in, teenage Prairie’s quest takes over, and the story begins to fail.

With the help of another character out of DC or Marvel, a “floozie with an Uzi,” Prairie uncovers her mother’s turncoat past. Seems Frenesi snitched on her radical confreres back in the High ’60s; she trysted with Brock Vond and set up at least one campus radical for murder. Prairie’s education keeps the gas flowing, tracing a worm path from the biker hangs of West Texas to a whores’ auction in Japan, with locker-room songs and one or two hilarious bits of stage business. Yet while the tale has the right touches of the bizarre, it starts to feel more and more hokey, dependent on chance encounters and smothered in simplistic lefty paranoia.

With these women, God knows Pynchon’s trying. He’s more than smart enough to recognize how his work has been devoid of developed female character. Even the questress of his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is a tinker-toy symbol for the decline of the West. In Vineland he huffs and puffs to get at sexual predilections, mother-daughter dynamics, the crises of childbearing. But once this story becomes Prairie’s, once it starts to require a balance of cartoon and epiphany, scene after scene falls flat. Frenesi’s attraction to Brock, the crux of her betrayal, never becomes plausible. In the murder she helps set up, everyone concerned acts on motivations held in place by smudgy Authorial scotch tape.

To his credit, Pynchon summons up a decent ending. The final chapters pull together a lot of earlier sprawl and herd it toward hallucinogenic wonder. So what if the psychology doesn’t work? So what if the plot remains nine-tenths coincidence? Pynchon’s no realist, surely, no more than his Vineland (its name an echo of an ancient dream America) lies anywhere along the actual route of U.S. 101. The protagonist of Lot 49 comes apart in our hands, but the book shocks and illuminates nonetheless. Aren’t Pynchon’s people supposed to be mere anagrammatic flotsam? Isn’t Frenesi Gates the gates through which we move to frenzy or “free sin,” and isn’t her inscrutable manipulation precisely the point, suggesting that we’re putty in the hands of the state?

Yes, yes…but no. Certainly a number of recent novels have managed to imagine a genuinely suffering humanity within an outlandish aesthetic construct. Outstanding American examples would include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Outside our country there are still more freethinking types, Gunter Grass perhaps the oldest, who still manage to harvest something from the over-cultivated terraces of a tortured history. Pynchon is trying the same, when all’s said and done. His best effects come out of a dense pastiche of on-site specifics, ripe with human avoirdupois; they don’t work as mind games alone. He may be no mainstream realist, but he’s no Italo Calvino either, spinning stories out of thin air.

Then too, Vineland falls well below the standards of the author’s own catalog. The shadow that chills this book worst is that of its predecessor, Gravity’s Rainbow, now seventeen years old. Every bit of business in Vineland was worked more profoundly and powerfully in Rainbow. Military-industrial nightmare? Rainbow offered the birth of the V-2 rocket and the atom bomb, both of them more terrifying in presentation and more intrinsic to what’s going on than any similar gambit in Vineland. The perversion metaphor—the life-force sodomized by the Powers That Be? Rainbow’s far, far sicker than Vineland, in which the sex is primarily masturbatory and soft-core. And if you’re looking for a deliberately ugly approach, an anti-aesthetic that embraces bad art and tinny talk, look no further than the Rainbow. The book squawks, it dribbles, getting sexist and racist whenever it damn well pleases, and it includes a diagram of a lifted middle finger. The novel’s a masterpiece of American shapelessness, no less, leaping up beside Moby-Dick or Leaves of Grass as it leads the whole scary world in its off-key sing-along (the last words are “Now, everybody…”).

Poor Vineland, having to follow such an act. Nevertheless, Pynchon could have accomplished something considerably more modest than the Rainbow and still accomplished much. But this novel is only fitfully alive, hippy-dippy when it should be sober, and weak-minded about its own deepest mysteries. Read it for the occasional winning passages and conflagrations, the few grapes that aren’t sour.

—Willamette Week, 1990

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1. Vineland’s protagonist found a more engaging incarnation later as The Dude, in the Coen brothers’ 1998 movie The BigLebowski. Pynchon seemed almost to return the favor in his 2009 novel, Inherent Vice.