Word: vineland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel, Vineland, Thomas Pynchon, that disembodied know-it-all hiding out somewhere inside our nervous system, performs an eerie kind of magic realism on the McLuhanite world around us. His is an America, in 1984, in which reflexes, values, even feelings have been programmed by that All- Seeing Deity known as the Tube. Remaking us in its own image (every seven days), TV consumes us much more than we do it. Lovers woo one another on screens, interface with friends, cite TV sets as corespondents in divorce trials. And the children who have grown up goggle-eyed around the electric...
...VINELAND by Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown; $19.95). In his first novel since Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a major writer turns his attention to all manner of American zaniness and produces a soaring, comic and visionary tale...
...novel is only marginally about dopers and spoilsport law-enforcement types. The showdown looming in Vineland County serves as the melody for a series of dazzling riffs on the 1970s and early '80s. It comes as a surprise to realize that these generations are the lost ones in Pynchon's fiction. V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) anticipated but arrived just before the triumphant effulgence of television and youth culture in American life; Gravity's Rainbow was chiefly set during World War II. So Vineland amounts to Pynchon's first words on the way we have been...
...people in Vineland have been steeped in TV long enough to become pickled. Some of them are Tubefreeks, whose habits of Tubal abuse alert the vigilant authorities at NEVER (National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation). No one, however ascetic, seems immune to this electronic rescrambling of brain cells. A member of the Thanatoids, a Northern California cult enamored of death and resentful at still being alive, notes that his people look at TV religiously: "There'll never be a Thanatoid sitcom, 'cause all they could show'd be scenes of Thanatoids watchin' the Tube...
Pynchon's devotion to electronic allusions has been criticized before, and Vineland will no doubt increase the number of protests. It is, admittedly, disquieting to find a major author drawing cultural sustenance from The Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy instead of The Odyssey and the Bible. But to condemn Pynchon for this strategy is to confuse the author with his characters. He is a gifted man with anti-elitist sympathies. Like some fairly big names in innovative fiction, including Flaubert, Joyce and Faulkner, Pynchon writes about people who would not be able to read the books in which they...