Why did Dave love this book?
Maybe ten years ago, I first picked this book up, and like most Pynchon books, if you aren’t in the mood to read something longer, difficult, and absurd, it’s not gonna work for you. For whatever reason, that’s where I was at the time, but it felt strange to consider Pynchon my favorite author without reading everything and digesting it properly. So, I came back to this book, and I’m so happy I did.
There are definitely people who consider Pynchon impenetrable, pretentious, or worse things, but in truth, if you approach his books for what they are, you can’t miss with them. What is that, exactly? Goofy stoner mysteries with plenty of asides for you to get lost in. I let myself get lost in the absurdity this time out, and it served as a reminder of what I really love about literature.
1 author picked Vineland as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the…