Thomas Pynchon: Vineland (1990)

Edition: Voyager, 2000

On opening Vineland, it is almost immediately clear that this is going to be a riotous novel. By the third chapter, the reader has been introduced to a man who makes his living by annually throwing himself through a plate glass window wearing a dress to qualify for mental illness disability benefit, a punk band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones, hired unheard to play at a traditional Mafia wedding by pretending to be Italian, and an FBI agent who may also be an escaped lunatic.

There is a bit of a dip in quality in the middle, once the flashbacks to the early seventies begin to take over, and from that point on Vineland is less funny. I don't think this is just due to my inability to conentrate, though I was extremely tired while reading this section of the novel.

The theme of Vineland is the hippy dream turning sour, and in particular the effects of the US government's attempts to extinguish the counter-culture. The main narrative is set in the mid-eighties, during Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign, and it is clear that Pynchon wants to make two points: first, that the repercussions of this crackdown affected lives both on the hippy side and in the law enforcement agencies right through the next fifteen years; and, second, that it was worth warning his readership about parallels between Nixon and Reagan.

"Vinland" is of course the name used by the Vikings to (almost certainly) mean the American continent, so implies that this is a novel about all of America - in other words, Pynchon intends to write what has been described as "the great American novel". However, reading it suggests that actually he wanted to subvert and satirise the idea of the great American novel. By making Vineland in the book a small (fictional) town in northern California, he is perhaps making a dig at the limited horizons of eighties American culture, and this is doubled by concentrating on hippy culture, never involving anything other than a small minority of US citizens.

Gravity's Rainbow and V. might have a bigger literary reputation, but of the Pynchon novels I have read - not all of them by any means - this is the most accessible, and the funniest. Each chapter in the first half made me laugh out loud at some point, even on re-reading. It has an easier plot to follow than Gravity's Rainbow in particular, which also helps make it an easier read.

I would rate Vineland at 7/10.

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1973


Twenty-five years on, this book is something of a classic of the underground hippie scene, though perhaps not on the scale of Pynchon's earlier V. It's written in a complex stream of consciousness style, which is quite hard to read until you begin to get into it; I'm not sure that I understood much of what was going on even when I got to the end of the 760 pages. It's not really about understanding what's going on; Gravity's Rainbow presents an experience which is not intended to be completely assimilated.

The main plot concerns the German wartime rocket development, and one of the major themes of the novel is the psychic effects the idea of the rocket had and has upon people. The main character, Tyrone Slothrop, has a particularly strong connection to the rocket, one noticed by British intelligence when they discover that the map on the wall of his office detailing his sexual conquests exactly matches the mathematically random (and therefore unpredictable) scattering of V2 impacts across London but a few days in advance. (I think it is this scattering which gives the novel's title, but this is not made explicitly clear.) The connection between his sexuality and the penile nature of the rocket is clear. As the war comes to a close, Slothrop is selected for a mission to discover what has happened to the rocket serial number 000000, which has disappeared. This rocket is rumoured to be some kind of super-rocket, something really special. As Slothrop's search goes on, he beomes more and more obsessed with the rocket, to the point of dressing up as the character Rocketman. He becomes a mythical figure in the Zone, which presumably refers to the American zone of occupied Germany. If the structure of the book leads to comparison with Ulysses, the obsessive nature of the search is like that of Moby Dick; both these novels are name-checked in the quoted review on the back cover.

There are independent deviations from the main plot, mainly taking the form of short (often ribald and obscene) anecdotes or fables. My favourite among these included the German spa resort of Bad Karma; the woman with a speech defect unable to pronounce umlauts, so pronouncing a warning about a "cute burglar" as "lift screwer" and inspiring an engineer who overheard her with the name for his new invention, the helicopter; and the story of Byron the immortal lightbulb.

Altogether, Gravity's Rainbow takes some getting into; it helps distinctly if you have some knowledge of engineering mathematics. It is not a novel for the prudish, but for those who are not and who are prepared to make the effort it is very worthwhile.