Vineland Reread
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.
Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this penetrating and nuanced work of literary criticism, University of Illinois professor Coviello (All Tomorrow's Parties) makes a spirited argument for the relevance of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland. Coviello acknowledges that Vineland is typically seen as one of Pynchon's lesser works, but argues that, in addition to its humor and anarchic invention, the novel is historically and politically significant. As it happens, his contention that Vineland predicts an American future where the state conducts "ceaseless carceral counterinsurgency" rings especially true in the present moment. He suggests the novel posits the 1960s as the end of the possibility for genuine social and cultural upheaval, which has since been crushed by "an ever-expanding system of penal confinement" with "a fully military-grade readiness of response." He quotes from the novel at length, particularly reveling in its dialogue, which he admires for its "reverence for the richness and splendid variety of ordinary American speech." Coviello's own language can be abstruse (with phrases like "the governing epistemologies of our quotidian semiconsensual Real"), but these moments are few. Whether readers are convinced by the end that this particular Pynchon novel is one of the author's finest, Coviello's astute and passionate analysis is a pleasure to read on its own terms.
