"All of a novelist’s characters are himself." - someone

"Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight. Pynchon himself’s a good companion, full of real affection for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real. He spoils us with descriptive flights." - Jonathan Lethem

An anarcho-collectivist cadre makes documentary films about protests during the sixties. The group embeds at a university where a group of students have banned administrators and police from campus, creating a siege. One of the film-collective members is sleeping with both the leader of the radical group holed up on the college campus and with the federal prosecutor in charge of infiltrating and destroying the group. She is coerced by the prosecutor and helps set the student group leader up and participates in his assassination. 

A year later, protected by the government but on the run from her past, she meets a guitar player who is performing in a rock band. The two marry and have a child. Shortly thereafter the federal prosecutor discovers his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts and sets her husband up on drug charges. As a deal cut with the prosecutor, the husband vows never to see the mother of his child again and takes the baby with him to Northern California and a town named Vineland, a place recommended to him by a DEA agent. His ex-wife goes into a witness protection program, remarries and has another kid. 

Flash forward to 1984 (note the year is also the title of a famous dystopian novel) and the War on Drugs. In Northern California, DEA agents threaten to show up at the home of the before mentioned father, Zoyd Wheeler, and his daughter, Prairie, who have been given foreknowledge and go into hiding. The federal prosecutor, Brock Vond, wants to get at the daughter (Prairie), who is now 14, of his ex-lover (Frenesi).  This is where Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, begins. 

To escape the escalating danger, Prairie goes to San Francisco where her boyfriend’s band, the Vomitones, will be playing at a mafia wedding. Through a string of coincidences, she meets a woman called DL at the wedding, her mother’s former partner from the days of the film collective, and the two head out to a female commune in the mountains above Monterey. There, Prairie is given access to the collective’s film archive, which includes footage her mother filmed. The women at the commune are ex-collective members, and they share anecdotes with Prairie about her mom.  The book ends with a large family reunion in Vinland where Brock Vond attempts to kidnap Prairie. 

The book is inhabited with what Pynchon calls Thanatoids, a seemingly zombie-like segment of the population that work menial jobs, watch a lot of TV and are not totally “alive," in fact some characters in the book die and reappear as Thanatoids. I’ve passed on a lot of detail, in part because the book mostly consists of dense flashbacks that strangely seem to go nowhere. Pynchon demands we remain awake while reading. Confused? There are no conventional plot twists in this life or any other. 

What is Pynchon doing with this book? Well, he’s explicitly looking at the upheaval on college campuses in the sixties. He is also writing about groups like the SLA and people like Patty Hearst, who famously developed Stockholm Syndrome and sided with her kidnappers. Other members of the SLA became fugitives who hid from the law under aliases and started families, had kids and careers. Most hippies, following the trend, at some point became yuppies. Vineland paints a picture of California in the sixties, seventies, and eighties in all its absurdity and un-reality. Mainly, though, I think Pynchon is commenting on the ways reality becomes dangerously warped by mediating forces, specifically television. It should be reiterated that the 'present moment' the book describes is 1984. 

Pynchon’s fame revolves around his anonymity. He has never given an interview or been photographed in public. He writes alternate histories (Vineland was published in the mid-1990's). When researchers dug into Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s National Book Award winning novel about wartime England and Germany, they discovered that much of what seemed implausible in the book was fact. American and British War profiteers colluded with German arms manufacturers; the theater of war was just that: theater created to divide and destroy. It has been said recently that Gravity's Rainbow would never be published in today's political media climate. The book would be deemed Q-Anon, Alt-Right, conspiracy theorist stuff. 

Jonathan Lethem does an excellent job of describing the oddball ex-hippy, and master, Thomas Pynchon. Here is Lethem writing for the New York Times about Pynchon’s 2013 book Bleeding Edge:

"Figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it. He’ll employ a string of citations to real and imaginary Bette Davis movies, say, or riffs on basketball, much as Pollock uses a color on a panoramic canvas or Coltrane a note in a solo: incessantly, arrestingly, yet seemingly without cumulative purpose. Instead, they’re threads for teasing at, or being teased by." 

Now zoom in a bit and look at Pynchon's style, which is absurd but comprehensive in its categorization, and dreamlike in its movement. At the book’s outset, Zoyd, our locally liked ex-hippy loser living in (the imaginary) Vineland, California, prepares to perform a televised stunt which will allow him to continue to receive his disability check from the State. Zoyd first buys an oversized dress at a thrift store and then a 'woman’s size' chainsaw (the size that fits into a purse). Next, going to the bar at which he assumes TV crews will be prepared to film him, we see him surrounded by gay yuppies at a bar off Highway 101 in Del Norte, California. He has ignored his answering machine's earlier warning telling him that the location the event would be filmed at this year is elsewhere.

He performs his jump annually. This year's jump takes place at the Cucumber Lounge. News trucks film him as he jumps through a plate glass window he discovers is also made of sugar; the film crews have staged this event and get images not just of the leap but then of a man wearing a dress holding a mini sized chainsaw munching on broken glass. 

The fact he initially goes to the wrong bar provides us with a few bits of information: Zoyd is a bit of a space cadet: even though he has been told this year his filmed act of 'mental illness' will take place at a new venue, he shows up at the one he worked previous; and, Zoyd is stuck in the past: he does not recognize that the lumberman’s bar has become a gay bar filled with yuppies, men dressed in boots that cost three figures and designer jeans. Finally, Zoyd seems to either lack self-awareness (he is not ashamed at all about the stunt he performs) or the fact of his lack of self-awareness about his stunt signals something important. Is Zoyd an idiot savant? Autistic? What does his inner life consist of? We do not know.

What is more pertinent than actual lived experience is the way it is experienced through the eyes of others; Pynchon gives us a man who lives up to those expectations by acting in an absurd manner and without dignity. This "otherness" points to the ways second order observation works. In this model, the individual does not matter,  because behavior is based on mimesis: we imitate based on some desire not our own. We look at something how it is observed by someone else, which is exactly the way TV and film, in general, operates. 

On one level, as I have stated, the novel's theme relates to what media, most specifically television, does to perception. On another, the characters and plot are a thinly veiled nod to the Weather Underground, the Manson family, and contemporary Humboldt and Mendocino Counties. Brock Vond represents not only C.A.M.P., the federal program to eradicate marijuana, but the fascism of Reagan America. The book is about the existent tensions between the ethos of the sixties and that of the eighties. Moreover the book details human biological impulses that go unchecked, unfettered and become warped and manipulated into authoritarianism.

What Pynchon does with the narrative relates to what John Gardner describes thusly:

"The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths."

We taste the sugar-glass Zoyd chews on when he does his stunt, and we experience the paranoia Frenesi and her group experience in their takeover of the college campus. Look at  this description of Thanatoids in Humboldt County waking up to a summer day on which a family reunion will occur, the conclusion to the book's action:

"Some had chosen to sleep inside their recreational vehicles, others lay out on mattresses in the beds of pickup trucks, a few had packed on further into the woods, and many had pitched tents in the meadows. Presently, as the light came up and birds started in, clock-radio alarms began to kick on in a thickening radio fugue of rock and roll till dawn, Bible interpretation, telephone voices still complaining about yesterday's news. Behind the mountains that climbed from here inland, morning-glory-blue light grew in the sky. Soon toasters and toaster ovens, wood fires, RV kitchen microwaves, gong-size skillets over propane flames, all working on bacon, links, eggs, flapjacks, waffles, hash browns, French toast, and hush puppies, were sending out branching invisible fractals of smell, reaching all over the place, fat smoke, charring spices, toasted bread, just-made coffee. People who'd slept overnight in the woods began to wander in. Blue jays appeared on foraging patrols, shrieking, bullying, scavenging, seagulls of the redwoods. Radio weather reports called for a real scorcher, even down in Vineland after the fog burned off. Younger cousins looked at the sky and into one another's backpacks. Fishermen set off along the creek bed to see what might be up and feeding, and golfers tried to scheme ways to slip off for a quick eighteen holes down at Las Sombras, a genuine links beside the fog-hung coast of Vineland. The marathon crazy eights game in a battered but shined-up Becker Airstream proceeded ageless as generation begetting generation, like a pot-au-feu of nickels, dimes, chips, greenbacks, and nuggets that might have been simmering continuously here since the times of the Little Gold Rush. Elsewhere in camp there were other games, poker, pinochle, dominoes, dice — but it was the Octomaniacs, as they thought of themselves, who as a crowd carried a more coherent look, as if they ought to be wearing matching T-shirts, while among the assortment of semi-strangers in and out of the other games, talent and judgment might vary by orders of magnitude, causing delays, astonishment, and episodes of consanguineous discombobulation."

This might describe an annual Rainbow Gathering, or Reggae on the River. It captures a time and place and that time and place is Humboldt County during the second half of the 20th century. Loggers have been replaced by hippies who are disappearing and being replaced by yuppies. The metamorphosis into a new and different type of 'space' is what Pynchon concerns himself with in Vineland. 

I read the book for about the third time and this time only began to recognize a plot. That might not be a resounding vote of confidence as a book review, but I like Pynchon's writing and I think he makes interesting points about the counterculture. Take, for example, this description of Brock Vond, the federal prosecutor infatuated with obtaining and controlling Frenesi:

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop."

Or this tidbit, spoken by a member of the former film collective:

"Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — 'I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?"

The question to ask is, has the counterculture--the hippies, the communes, the intentional communities--merely replaced Nixon's moral majority? Sadly, I think in the age of Covid, Trump, the internet and smart phones, the answer is a resounding YES! Reagan has been replaced by Biden; and the Australian police sergeant in charge of maintaining a strict health quarantine, the high school principal in San Francisco watching students for masks slipping beneath their noses, the woman demanding that the unvaccinated stay away from her...these real life 'characters' display to one degree or another the inchoate characterizations that, if allowed to go unchecked, result in the kind of character that is Brock Vond: controlling, desperate and absolutely psychopathic.