Defenestration Blues: Vineland Turns Fifteen

I know few readers who think of Thomas Pynchon as a California writer. Scholars who revel in Californiana are biased toward classic West-texts – Ramona, The Octopus, The Grapes of Wrath – and often refuse mention of Pynchon as part of our geographical canon, though he is, and high on the list of achievers.

Pynchon’s first California novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is the apex of conspiracy tracts, and it surveys modern America’s horrors, from the military industrial complex to Jacobean drama revivals. The novel’s guide is Oedipa Maas, a heroine of patience and adventure who glides in and out of doomed scenarios with a California girl's grace. Whether traveling west on San Francisco’s Fulton 5 bus or being serenaded by the garageless garage band The Paranoids, the reader's empathy is firmly for Oedipa, and this makes the nonsense Pynchon proposes genuine because it affects her being.

Vineland (1990) is far richer, funnier, and wide ranging than The Crying of Lot 49, but there are few direct comparisons, other than the vibe, which is important to Pynchon books, because the vibe is where he gets you hooked.

At the heart of Vineland is the turning of Frenesi Gates from a budding radical into a compromised government agent, working under the tutelage and spell of the cassanova-esque Brock Vond, federal prosecutor. Frenesi and her co-horts, including DL, a female ninja (ninjette) with iron will and strength, formed the film collective 24fps at Trasero College (south of Orange Co., north of San Diego) to document the struggle, the revolution and the movement that was the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Frenesi, post entanglement with this group, births Prairie, a spitfire daughter, whom she abandons in a heartbreaking post-partum spell, and it is Prairie’s quest to find her mother, now underground, that moves us through Vineland, though it is not that simple a narration.

Pynchon has a lot of fun with set pieces on our beaches, high up the 101, and in the Bay Area, where The Crying of Lot 49’s Mucho Maas makes a welcome cameo. In Vineland, Pynchon breaks in and out of scenes with fleeting characters, tells wicked jokes (“When your mother stops giving head to stray dogs”), and turns important encounters anyway he wants. Pynchon gets away with this because, I think, readers want him to. I empathize but don’t understand those who dismiss Vineland, because even in the midst of the book’s madness – aboard the Hawaiian airline where Zoyd Wheeler (Prairie’s dad?) plays keyboard to a tikki-ed out cabin; in the Tokyo whorehouse where DL mistakenly applies a lethal ninja combination; or to fictional Vineland itself, where Billy Barf and the Vomitones regale the patrons of the Cucumber Lounge – Pynchon lets out slips of prose that are devastating, and the best by a living author.

I’m thinking of a couple great scenes, one in which Zoyd returns from the beach with baby Prairie – she has fallen asleep in the sea breeze; and another with DL at her cabin compound, where she listens to the clink of heavy rocks submerged beneath a nearby stream. When I come across these solemn, peaceful lines of prose, I’m floored by their beauty and power, and because they serve as a break from the page long run-on sentences, it keeps one from having to put the book down. Pynchon knows what he’s doing, and though he’s completely able to turn out fare ala Henry James, he won’t and shouldn’t. We need mad men like him writing novels because rewards are there for readers willing to indulge him.

Vineland is hard to categorize, and hard to debate in light of Pynchon’s other work, which is universally regarded as superior. For all my admiration of Vineland, it just might be a lengthy, singular pun on George Lucas’s film “The Empire Strikes Back.” I’d hate to think Pynchon is putting me on, but if one is to be had, best it’s done by a master rather than a hack.