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Vineland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a

postmodern fiction set in California, United States in Vineland
1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election.[1]
Through flashbacks by its characters, who have
lived the sixties in their youth, the story accounts for
the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and
describes the traits of the fascist Nixonian
repression and its War on drugs that clashed with it;
and it articulates the slide and transformation that
occurred in American culture from the 1960s to the
1980s.[1][2][3]

Contents
1 Title and location
2 Plot 1st edition cover
3 Technique
Author(s) Thomas Pynchon
4 Notes
5 References Country United States
6 Further reading Language English
7 External links
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Little, Brown

Title and location Publication 1990

date
Vineland, the central locale of the novel, is a Media type Print (Hardcover)
fictional small town in California's Anderson Valley
Pages 385 pp
(perhaps based upon Boonville). Vineland may be a
play on the word "Hollywood", a reference to the ISBN 0-316-72444-0
first Viking settlement in North America, Vinland, or OCLC Number 20219474 (http://worldcat.org
a reference to Andrey Vinelander, a character in /oclc/20219474)
Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family
Dewey 813/.54 20
Chronicle. Still others contend that the title refers to
Vineland, New Jersey or a "Vinland the Good" Decimal
mentioned in a Frank O'Hara poem. However, the LC PS3566.Y55 V56 1990
most obvious explanation is that the title is a Classification
reference to the area in which the novel is set,
Preceded by Slow Learner
which is near California's grapevine-filled Wine
Country. Followed by Mason & Dixon

Plot
The story is set in California, United States, in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election.[1]
After a scene in which ex-hippie Zoyd Wheeler dives through a window, something he is required
to do yearly in order to keep receiving mental disability checks, the action of the novel opens with

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the resurfacing of DEA agent Brock Vond, who (through a platoon of agents) forces Zoyd and his
14-year-old daughter Prairie out of their house. They hide from Brock, and from Hector Zuiga (a
drug-enforcement federale from Zoyd's past, who Zoyd suspects is in cahoots with Brock) with
old friends of Zoyd's, who recount to the mystified Prairie the story of Brock's motivation for what
he has done.

This hinges heavily on Frenesi Gates, Prairie's mother, whom she has never met. In the '60s,
during the height of the hippie era, the fictional College of the Surf seceded from the United
States and became its own nation of hippies and dope smokers, called the People's Republic of
Rock and Roll (PR). Brock Vond, working for the DEA, intends to bring down PR, and finds a
willing accomplice in Frenesi. She is a member of 24fps, a militant film collective (other members
of which are the people telling Prairie their story in the present day), that seeks to document the
"fascists' " transgressions against freedom and the hippie ideals. Frenesi is uncontrollably
attracted to Brock and the sex he provides, and ends up working as a double agent to bring
about the killing of the de facto leader of PR, Weed Atman (a math professor who accidentally
became the subject of a cult of personality).

Her betrayal caused Frenesi to need to flee, and she has been living in witness protection with
Brock's help up until the present day. Now she has disappeared. The membership of 24fps,
Brock Vond, and Hector Zuiga are all searching her out, for their various motives. The book's
theme of the ubiquity of television (or the Tube) comes to a head when Hector, a Tube addict who
has actually not been working with Brock, finds funding to create his pet project of a movie telling
the story of the depraved sixties, with Frenesi Gates as the star, and the pomp and circumstance
surrounding this big-money deal create a net of safety that allows Frenesi to come out of hiding.
24fps finds her and achieves their goal of allowing Prairie to meet her, at an enormous reunion of
Frenesi's family. Weed Atman is also present at the reunion as one of many Thanatoids in the
bookpeople who are in a state that is "like death, but different."

Brock, nearly omnipotent with DEA funds, finds Prairie with a surveillance helicopter, and tries to
snatch her up in order to get to Frenesi, but while he is hovering above her on a ladder, the
government abruptly cuts all his funding due to a loss of interest in funding the war on drugs
because America has begun playing along willingly with the anti-drug ideal, and his helicopter
pilot flies him away. Later he tries to come after Prairie and Frenesi again, but ends up stranded
on a country road, where vengeful mechanics, acquaintances of 24fps, take him to cross the river
of death and become a Thanatoid. The family reunion allows everyone to tie up all their loose
ends together, and the book ends with Prairie looking into the beginning of a life no longer
controlled by the fallout of the past.

Technique
Throughout the novel, Pynchon's technique is recognizable. From a cameo of Mucho Maas (from
The Crying of Lot 49) to a bizarre episode hinting at Godzilla, Pynchon's "zaniness" pervades the
novel. For example, Pynchon laces the book with Star Trek references. He has his characters
watch a sitcom named Say, Jim, about a starship all of whose officers "were black except for the
Communications Officer, a freckled, redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara." The numerous
references to films rigorously include the year of release in a manner unusual for a work of fiction.
Several characters are Thanatoids, victims of karmic imbalance and inhabitants of a strange state
of being "like death, only different."

In addition, the novel is replete with female ninjas, astrologers, marijuana smokers, television
addicts, musical interludes (including the theme song of The Smurfs) and, naturally, metaphors
drawn from Star Trek.

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Notes
1. ^ a b c Knabb 2002
2. ^ Vineland, p.71
3. ^ Patell (2001) p.129

References
Ken Knabb (2002) Raptor, Rapist, Rapture: The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas
Pynchon's Vineland (http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html)
Patell, Cyrus R. K. (2001) Negative liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the problem of liberal
ideology (http://books.google.com/books?id=VLaMgwBxZ1kC)

Further reading
^ Pynchon, Thomas R. Vineland. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
^ Rushdie, Salman. "Still Crazy After All Those Years (http://www.themodernword.com
/pynchon/review_nyt_vineland.html)", The New York Times 14 January 1990.
^ Geddes, Dan. "Pynchon's Vineland: The War On Drugs and the Coming American
Police-State (http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Vineland.html)", The Satirist
^ Gordon, Andrew. "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir
(http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/agordon/pynchon.htm)". The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes
on Pynchon's Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal,
IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994): 167-78.
^ Thoreen, David. The President's Emergency War Powers And The Erosion Of Civil
Liberties In Pynchon's Vineland (http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext
/okla/thoreen24.htm), Oklahoma City University Law Review 24, No. 3 (1999).
^ John Diebold and Michael Goodwin: Babies of Wackiness (http://www.mindspring.com
/~shadow88/), a "reader's guide to Vineland"

External links
ThomasPynchon.com (http://www.thomaspynchon.com/)
Vineland Wiki (http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)

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Categories: 1990 novels Novels by Thomas Pynchon Fictional populated places in California
Novels set in California Mendocino County, California

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