Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

First published: 1990

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The late 1980’s

Locale: Northern California

Principal Characters:

• Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, a government pensioner and handyman
• Prairie, Zoyd’s daughter, who is questing for information about her mother
• Frenesi Gates, Prairie’s mother and Zoyd’s former wife, a onetime radical who is now an undercover government agent
• Brock Vond, a government prosecutor who was once Frenesi’s lover and is now her controller
• DL Chastain, a onetime friend of Frenesi, Prairie’s guide in her quest
• Hub Gates, and
• Sasha Gates, Frenesi’s radical parents, who are involved in the film industry
• Hector Zuñiga, a television-mad drug agent

The Novel

Zoyd Wheeler has been living a quiet life in Vineland, a fictitious town in Northern California, with his daughter Prairie. Zoyd does odd jobs for neighbors, grows marijuana, and collects a government pension for committing a crazy act every year: specifically, for throwing himself through a plate-glass window in a local restaurant in front of television cameras. Prairie works in a local health-food pizza parlor and hangs out with a rock band, Billy Barf and the Vomitones.

Things are changing at the novel’s beginning. The site of Zoyd’s annual fling is shifted without explanation, and there are rumors of a major government antidrug operation in the area. Various kinds of police and federal troops are seen in Vineland. Hector Zuñiga warns Zoyd that Prairie is in danger, probably from Brock Vond. There are rumors that Vond has lost track of Frenesi, an agent whom he controls, and that he will try to find her by using Prairie. Prairie, on her own, is anxious for more information about her mother; Zoyd and Sasha Gates, Prairie’s grandmother, have told her only that Frenesi is underground, hiding from government agents because of her activities in the 1960’s.

Prairie, warned by her father that she should leave the area, goes with the band to Southern California, where they are scheduled to play at a Mafia wedding while pretending to be an Italian band. In the powder room, Prairie accidentally draws the attention of DL Chastain, a martial-arts expert who had been close to Frenesi in the turmoil of the 1960’s. DL introduces Prairie to the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, whose files reveal to the young woman the activities in which her mother had been involved as a member of a radical film collective.

DL’s life is presented in considerable detail. Daughter of a career Army enlisted man, she had become a student of martial arts with a renowned teacher while her father was stationed in Japan. Her skills, far beyond normal, were sometimes made use of by others in ways she could not always control; at one point, she was programmed to kill Brock Vond but failed. She has taken control of her own life and is now a partner of another master of the martial arts, Takeshi Fumimota, who has his own unusual history.

From the archives at the retreat and from DL, Prairie learns that Frenesi had participated in the rebellion at a small California college, had encountered and been fascinated by Brock Vond, had been seduced by him, and had served as his agent in the murder of a popular professor named Weed. The murder, along with the imminent occupation of the campus of the college by police and federal troops, had brought the rebellion to an end. Frenesi had been spirited away by Vond and sequestered in a secret government camp. Rescued by DL, she had eventually married Zoyd and given birth to Prairie before returning to Vond and becoming an underground government agent.

In the meantime, Frenesi has become wedded to her new life. She has married again to another undercover agent, Flash, and has another child, a son named Justin. She and Flash have been moved from town to town, wherever their services were needed. At the time when Prairie begins her search, however, Frenesi’s world is coming apart. The Ronald Reagan Administration has cut off funding for Brock Vond’s operation, and Frenesi sets out with Flash and Justin for Vineland.

Prairie also returns to Vineland with DL and Takeshi Fumimota in time for the periodic reunion of Sasha Gates’s family; the community feeling of the family helps to dissipate the threat of government intervention. Prairie finally meets her mother, and there is something close to a reconciliation between them. In the end, Brock Vond attempts to kidnap Prairie, who he claims is his daughter; the attempt is frustrated, and he is condemned by higher forces in the government. The raid is called off, the troops and police withdraw from the area, and there is a happy ending, at least temporarily, for Prairie, her friends, and her relatives.

The Characters

Frenesi Gates is among the most fully developed and interesting characters in all of Pynchon’s work. She is seen from the point of view of the third-person narrator and also from the perspectives of her mother, Zoyd, Prairie, and DL as well as the Senior Attentive of the Sisterhood. Totally committed to the feminist film collective with which she is associated, daughter of her radical parents in her devotion to social causes, Frenesi is nevertheless fascinated, attracted, and repelled by Brock Vond and by the kind of authoritarian power he represents. At first, she tries to play games with Vond, then she falls in love with him; finally, she is made to face the extent of her own degradation. Over her protests, Vond gets her to transport the gun that will kill Weed, the professor who is at the heart of the student uprising. Once she has done this, she can place no limit on what she will do, and her life working as an agent for Vond is an inevitable next step. Still, as she is seen with Flash and Justin, she has not become a woman without conscience. She misses Prairie and regrets having left her, although she could see no alternative at the time. When the funds dry up and she is cast out of her work by a change in government policy, she instinctively returns to the reunion of her mother’s clan. There, she discovers something like mercy and some sort of peace.

The other characters are less original and less developed. Prairie is presented as a typical teenage daughter of hippies, hip herself but self-sufficient and imaginative. When DL takes her to the feminist institute, Prairie takes over a disorganized kitchen and becomes the much-admired chef for the whole organization. When the place is raided, she leaves with DL and Takeshi Fumimota without losing her cool. She wants to find her mother and is shocked by what she learns about Frenesi, but in the end, she neither sentimentalizes nor rejects her mother.

DL Chastain is a superwoman, not only strong physically but also a sensitive guide for Prairie’s search. Zoyd is a typical hippie grown older and wiser, caring for Prairie but willing to let her find her own way. Hector Zuñiga is a parody of a drug-enforcement agent, himself helplessly addicted not to drugs but to television. Sasha Gates is a warm woman, politically dedicated to radical causes, caring enough about Prairie to work out an accommodation with Zoyd for the girl’s care despite her scorn for Zoyd. Hub Gates is a fine technician, somewhat less political than his wife.

Brock Vond is clearly the villain of the novel. He has used his authority as a kind of roving prosecutor to harass anyone with whom he disagrees, and he deliberately corrupts Frenesi. In the later stages of the action, he is willing to bring all the forces of a repressive government to bear on the entire Vineland community in order to bring Frenesi to heel and to secure Prairie, whom he believes to be his daughter. His failure and destruction at the end are nearly melodramatic, as if, despite all the power it is shown to have in the novel, evil cannot finally win.

Critical Context

Vineland is the most overtly political of Thomas Pynchon’s novels. Themes and ideas from the earlier books are given more direct expression, as if Pynchon had decided that readers and critics were not understanding his principal ideas. The book contains clear-cut distinctions between good and bad characters, and it is the only one of Pynchon’s novels to comment directly on the domestic political scene.

At the same time, Vineland is, like the earlier novels, varied in its prose styles, making use of wild and sometimes profane humor, original song lyrics, and caustic addresses from the narrator to the characters, among other devices. While it is the first of Pynchon’s novels to deal explicitly with supernatural events—including a class of beings called Thanatoids, the shades of people who are dead but not quite gone, and the fact that DL Chastain is invested with superhuman powers—the supernatural has never been entirely excluded from Pynchon’s fictional world. If it is less encyclopedic than Pynchon’s most famous novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vineland is also more accessible.

Bibliography

Bergh, Patricia A. “(De)constructing the Image: Thomas Pynchons’s Postmodern Woman” Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Spring, 1997): 1-11. Focusing on the character of Frenesi Gates who epitomizes the postmodern woman in Pynchon’s novel, Bergh interprets Frenesi’s personality through the eyes of Oedipa Maas in Lot 49 and Prairie Wheeler in Vineland. Bergh shows that Pynchon’s female characters are shaped by media/visual sources assigned to them by outside sources and that the individual self in Pynchon’s works is engulfed and erased by cybernetic technology.

Conner, Marc C. “Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful.” Studies in American Fiction 24 (Spring, 1996): 65-85. Conner asserts that Pynchon deals more with the aesthetic of the beautiful in Vineland than with the aesthetic of the sublime as in his previous novels. He argues that Pynchon’s interest shifts from the accepted concepts of postmodernism to ideas more suited to the ethical problems of the late twentieth century, and offers hope that ethical relations will rejuvenate a world tired of the aesthetics of postmodernism.

Green, Geoffrey, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey, eds. The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novels. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. A collection of essays that offer a detailed analysis and valuable insight into Pynchon’s novel. Useful bibliographical references are included.

Horstman, Joey E. “ Transcendence Through Starvation’: Thomas Pynchon’s Televisual Style in Vineland.” Christianity and Literature 47 (Spring, 1998): 331-350. Horstman views Pynchon’s novel as a postmodern meditation on the nature of television. Although Pynchon criticizes television’s role as a major distraction, he also undercuts his criticism by mimicking the technology and so creates a novel that parallels the superficial features of television.

Robberds, Mark. “The New Historicist Creepers of Vineland.” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36 (Summer, 1995): 237-248. Robberds demonstrates that the structure of Pynchon’s novel reflects 1960s American cultural history as seen through the eyes of Prairie. In fact, he argues that the whole novel can be taken as a national allegory presenting American society as a culture that has fused and confused television with reality.

Rushdie, Salman. “Still Crazy After All These Years.” The New York Times Book Review 95 (January 14, 1990): 1, 36-37. The noted novelist highly praises Pynchon’s novel, calling attention to its political message and also emphasizing the author’s choice of anonymity. Rushdie is most interested in Pynchon’s condemnation of political and social conformity and the ways in which governments and other organizations attempt to enforce their views.