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In his first novel for 17 years, the author tells the story of a group of Americans living in the 1980s who are still struggling with the consequences of their lives in the 1960s. "Gravity's Rainbow" shared the National Book Award in 1973. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A weird and wonderful journey through post-war America
While there are some territories of the Pynchon universe I yet have to discover, I find myself returning again and again to this twisted version of twentieth-century America, inhabited by classic Pynchon characters like Zoyd Wheeler and Frenesi Gates. Vineland may not be Pynchon's most-read novel, but it shows all the marks of his genius: from his bizarre sense of humor to his knack for mixing the fantastic with the real. It moreover has one great advantage over most of his other work: it is set in the US, especially California, of the 1960s-1980s, a place and period he knew from personal experience, rather than from his encyclopedic knowledge. As a result, it is more full of life and invested with a warmth of feeling that is sometimes lacking in his other novels.

Fundamentally, Vineland is about the legacy of the 1960s, and its wide range of characters all have to deal in some way with their experiences during this important decade, whether they were in revolutionary outfits, popular bands, or worked for the FBI. Pynchon shows great skill in weaving together numerous story-lines of various degrees of weirdness, and tells a surprisingly rounded story that centers around themes like authority, obsessive love, and hope for the future. Vineland reads at times like a science-fiction novel, a great family saga, or an unfliching portrayal of a heated period of American history, and is always full of humour and unforgettable characters. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone, whether an experienced Pynchonian or new to his remarkable fiction. In fact, I think Vineland serves as the best available introduction to Pynchon that is presently available.

No Tarzan. No Jane. No Cheetah -
- just Pynchon's group of weirdo characters still living in the sixties though it's the eighties. Take a whole bunch of folks without a prescription for what they're taking much less one for what they're thinking or doing. Add in a Fed Prosecutor head case who has no chemical excuse. Mix in various adherents of oriental mind, body. death and healing arts. Mix together with some mantras and anti-everything that isn't their cause du jour.

You now have the first chapter of Vineland and it just gets stranger from there. And, this is Pynchon's most understandable and easily read effort to this point in his published career.

Never fear though. He doesn't cross every "t" or dot every "i" or really let you know for sure where he's going or what he's going to do once he gets there. If you figure that out on your own, that's fine. If not, that's fine, too.

If you've wondered what the fuss is about Pynchon, this is a good place to start figuring it out. Vineland is equipped with literary training wheels, so hop on and start pedaling.

Thank You Mr. P
Maybe it's because I'm a Californian but this novel speaks volumes of our exentential existance. Hat's off to a novel that other's would call their "great American novel" but for Mr. P, a tough act to follow after "GR." With echo's to the Reagan paranoia, all I can say is,"this bud's for you." May Zoyd live in all of us. ... Read more

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For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration.Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre.In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape, and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape.He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, criss-crossing, and erasures of his writing.Linking this to the problem of what Henri LeFebvre called "grammatological terrorism"—the problem of being trapped within discourses that dictate conditions of possibility and deep structures of belief—Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

Lines of Flight will be of interest to scholars engaged by contemporary American literature, literary theory, and the writing of Pynchon, in particular. ... Read more

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Addressing a distinct gap in the field, Shawn Smith explores Pynchon as a historical novelist and thinker. Interpreting Pynchon's four major novels: "V.", "Gravity's Rainbow", "Vineland" and" Mason & Dixon", he argues that what we call the postmodern characteristics of Thomas Pynchon's narrative technique are rhetorical arguments, expressed through the forms of his texts, for Pynchon's philosophy of what twentieth century history has meant, as well as a rhetorical commentary on the problems of historiographic representation.Focusing on Pynchon as a historical novelist, as well as a writer with complex ideas on both historiographic representation and how historical knowledge develops and is communicated, this book's fresh approach makes it invaluable to Pynchon scholars and students of postmodern fiction. ... Read more

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Everybody’s America reassesses Pynchon’s literary career in order to explain the central role played by the racialization of American culture in the postmodernist deconstruction of subjectivity and literary authority and in the crisis in white liberal culture. It charts the evolution of both these cultural transformations from Pynchon’s early short stories, composed in the late 1950s, through Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973. This book demonstrates that Pynchon deploys techniques associated with the decentering of the linguistic sign and the fragmentation of narrative in order to work through the anxieties of white male subjects in their encounter with racial otherness. It also charts Pynchon’s attention to non-white and non-Euro-American voices and cultural forms, which imply an awareness of and interest in processes of transculturation occurring both within U.S. borders and between the U.S. and the Third World. In these ways, his novels attempt to acknowledge the implicit racism in many elements of white American culture and to grapple with the psychological and sociopolitical effects of that racism on both white and black Americans. The argument of Everybody’s America, however, also considers the limits of Pynchon’s implicit commitment to hybridity as a social ideal, identifying attitudes expressed in his work that suggest a residual attraction to the mainstream liberalism of the fifties and early sixties. Pynchon’s fiction dramatizes the conflict between the discourses and values of such liberalism and those of an emergent multiculturalist ethos that names and valorizes social difference and hybridity. In identifying the competition between residual liberalism and an emergent multiculturalism, Everybody’s America makes its contribution to the broader understanding of postmodern culture.

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Thomas Pynchon has received an unparalleled amount of criticism in the twenty-five years since the publication of his first novel: two dozen books, dozens of chapters in other books, hundreds of articles, even his own journal. No other novelist has generated as much criticism in as short a time, making Clifford Mead's bibliography a welcome and indispensable guide. Section one catalogues Pynchon's own writingsbooks, magazine contributions, reprints, translations, and piracieswhile section two offers an exhaustive listing of virtually everything that had been written on Pynchon by 1989.

Two special sections enhance the value of this book: one reprints Pynchon's dozen or so endorsements written for other booksmost inaccessible or out-of-printwhile the other reprints Pynchon's hitherto unknown contributions to his high school newspaper. The book is illustrated throughout with photographs of dust jacket covers (including a trial cover for Gravity's Rainbow), rare ephemera, and pictures of the young Pynchon from his high school yearbook. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Only for those who enjoy intellectual & artistic challenges
This fresh examination of the wide range of Pynchon's works --painting, film, music, and literature-- shows that his true art lies in humanistic allusions that stress the possibility of spiritually separating oneself from the modern wasteland. Written by a literature professor, the point of the book, I believe, is to show that although Pynchon's work depicts contemporary Western culture as destructive & entropic, he also holds an optimism for our ability to escape the traps of the modernist worldview/paradigm. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World
This is a useful discussion of Thomas Pynchon's contribution to American literature and the psychology underlying his early work. It contains useful footnotes and references to other contemporary authors whose philosophy mirror similar influences. ... Read more

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Great Novelists-Thirteen- Thomas Pynchon

Students’ Academy


"There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance."

------Thomas Pynchon

Introduction
Childhood and Education
Early Career
The Crying of Lot 49
Gravity's Rainbow
Vineland
Mason & Dixon
Against the Day
Inherent Vice
Style
Themes
Influence
Comparisons
Epigones
Private Life
Later Years



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Print ISBN: 978-0-557-77549-1 ... Read more