vineland

Against the Day
$18.00
I had started reading this book and lost it after only about 600 pages, apparently to a literate thief. The same day, a news bulletin reported that a young lad named Falcon escaped from Colorado in an odd-looking hot-air balloon. I assumed of course that Falcon had embarked upon an exciting adventure with the Chums of Chance, but I needed to order a new copy of the book to be sure. Thanks to Amazon, the replacement book arrived quickly enough to affirm the truth. Falcon, wherever you are now, some of us are not fooled by the official story that came out later about irresponsible parents and reality shows.

Inherent Vice
$27.95
This book must have been written by a cute undergraduate student working under Pynchon's wing. The stoner jokes are not funny. The zeitgeist of the sixties is clearly contrived. This is an attempt to find the groove that Tom Wolf, Tom Robbins and to a lesser extent Vonnegut so adeptly mined. Pychon's attempt however is a miserable failure. If this MS had been submitted by an unpublished writer it would have been universally rejected. I left my copy in hotel room trash can. Really pathetic.
P.S. I have read V, Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 which are all vastly superior works.

Vineland Dreams
$16.98
Every note was romantic, although not every track of the song was original written by himself, we can still feel the passion from his guitar... Why did he let us wait till NEW STEVE LAURY come for over ten years?

Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
$16.00
I just finished re-reading Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and have developed a whole new appreciation for it. I think the fact that it is about times in recent memory makes it appear to deceptively "fun", like a Tom Robbinsesque Zen-Lite, when in fact there is, as in Gravity's Rainbow, a wealth of obscure historical data churning underneath the surface, and a theme that successfully handles issues of family unities pitted against the fraying and unravelling of time, darkly reflected in murky swamps of politics, tying it all together in a way that is ultimately moving and profound, television inspired slapstick moments and stilted humor a commentary on the proceedings rather than a flaw in style; it is who we are. The fact that the book keeps numerous plot strands through various time periods moving along briskly reflects an apogee of Pynchon's style and skill; furthermore, this book seems to be a continuation and combination of Against The Day, with its historical perspective on unions, collective organizing and the tyranny of lucre, and the psycho-social explosions of The Crying Of Lot 49, bringing together from the two books characters, in spirit if not in name, and ideas to create a three-dimensional picture of American society, with all its strengths and weaknesses, as an ongoing enterprise in a constant state of renewal, absolving and passing on foibles and indiscretions from generation to generation, tangled vines intertwining as they are pushed into the rich black earth of history by the new growth ever sprouting above.

I recommend reading it again. I got a lot more out of it the second time.