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Reviewland
Jul. 10th, 2015 08:11 pmHey,
So last night I finished wading through Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. This book has a lot of similarities to Inherent Vice, the book that's gotten me interested in catching up on Pynchon's works.
Like Vice, Vineland starts off following a holdout hippie pining for a lost love. In this case, the hippie is Zoyd Wheeler who takes on odd jobs and a yearly freak-out to make ends meet. He pines for his ex-wife Ferensi who ran off years ago with Brock Vond, a Federal prosecutor leaving behind Zoyd and their daughter Prairie.
Now, in 1984, things are starting to get weird. A rising tide of law enforcement is sweeping into the sleepy retreat of Vineland and Zoyd is pretty sure he'll get caught up in it. He sends Prairie out to try and get some help from Karmic Adjuster Takeshi and his ninja partner DL.
And things just kind of spool from there. Zoyd, Prairie, and Ferensi are the kernels to a whole series of stories that spill out, one on top of the other, moving from the present to the past and back again. Stories within stories abound and the narrator may shift by the time it's over. It also has some great bits of wordplay and some passages that actually made me laugh out loud.
It's very...Pynchon-y. It kind of gets lost in itself in a few places and untangling the threads of what you just read can be a bit of a struggle. However, in the main, I enjoyed the book. Not exactly beach reading, but worth checking out.
later
Tom
So last night I finished wading through Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. This book has a lot of similarities to Inherent Vice, the book that's gotten me interested in catching up on Pynchon's works.
Like Vice, Vineland starts off following a holdout hippie pining for a lost love. In this case, the hippie is Zoyd Wheeler who takes on odd jobs and a yearly freak-out to make ends meet. He pines for his ex-wife Ferensi who ran off years ago with Brock Vond, a Federal prosecutor leaving behind Zoyd and their daughter Prairie.
Now, in 1984, things are starting to get weird. A rising tide of law enforcement is sweeping into the sleepy retreat of Vineland and Zoyd is pretty sure he'll get caught up in it. He sends Prairie out to try and get some help from Karmic Adjuster Takeshi and his ninja partner DL.
And things just kind of spool from there. Zoyd, Prairie, and Ferensi are the kernels to a whole series of stories that spill out, one on top of the other, moving from the present to the past and back again. Stories within stories abound and the narrator may shift by the time it's over. It also has some great bits of wordplay and some passages that actually made me laugh out loud.
It's very...Pynchon-y. It kind of gets lost in itself in a few places and untangling the threads of what you just read can be a bit of a struggle. However, in the main, I enjoyed the book. Not exactly beach reading, but worth checking out.
later
Tom
