Heard It Through The Vineland

Still no power at current home. Hearing "next week" mentioned. Patience wearing thin. Contemplating bargain with dark, otherworldly powers, where I will receive electricity and Internet access in exchange for the lives of my coworkers.

So I'll talk about a book, because surely that will cheer me up. Or not. I mentioned last summer I thought about buying Gravity's Rainbow in a used bookstore last summer, but didn't owing to low cash flow, and it wasn't there when I next visited. But the local library had Vineland so I checked it out, and well, I don't know whether it encouraged me to read more of Pynchon's work or not.

A aging hippie named Zoyd lives in a northern California town called Vineland. His relatively peaceful existence with his daughter Prairie is wrecked by the arrival of first, his old sparring mate, DEA Agent Herrera, and then Federal Prosecuter Brock Vond, who is on a rampage, ostensibly related to Prairie's mom, Zoyd' ex-wife, Frensi. So Brock adopts a disguise and tries to stay around town and keep an eye on his confiscated home, while Prairie heads for the hills in the company of her boyfriend's band, who will be playing at an Italian wedding, despite none of them being Italian. While at the wedding, she meets and old friends of her mother's, DL, who helps guard her and tells her about her mother, as well as her own life. Ultimately, there's no big confrontation, as Brock's madness is short-circuited by someone higher up the ladder.

The book ostensibly takes place in the mid-80s, but I think it's a slightly surreal version, based on the movies he mentions, the fact the band gains a Russian disciple (the band put copies of their music in a floating tube, and put it to sea, it reached Russia, and they're a huge deal there), some other things that just seem kind of odd (giant monster footprints smashing research labs, planes being boarded in mid-air by other planes, passengers removed, never seen again). There's a detox place for Tube addicts, though near as I can tell, "Tube" is just television, not even with some hookup into your spinal cord or anything.

Everyone in the book seems locked into their past. Zoyd unable to stop being a slacker recreational drug user, Brock can't stop being obsessed with Frenesi, Frenesi can't stop thinking about the days when she made films about the injustices and abuses of power, even though she sold out to those folks years ago. DL is the closest to looking forward, because she's already had the moment where her fixation on the past, in her case, desire to kill Brock Vond, lead her to nearly kill the man she now works with in Karma Accounting. Yeah, there are people called Thanatoids, who are dead, but haven't passed on, and they can be solid, and they can have homes and cars, but sometimes those vanish, and they have to balance their karma somehow to leave, and Takeshi decided to work on helping them, and DL was forced to aid him, to make up for using the deadly Vibrating Palm against him. So you have people who obviously are stuck in the past, and can be distinguished as such (Thanatoids), but everyone else is in the same boat, just less obviously so.

I think there's something else in there about each generation repeating the mistakes of the previous one, because while Frenesi betrayed her cause out of some attraction to Brock, by the end, Prairie, who is very nearly abducted by the crazy Federal Prosecuter as he rappelled out of a helicopter, is asking him to come back, long after he'd left. That induced a groan, because the idea yet another girl was falling for this lunatic was just depressing. Maybe that's why everybody keeps looking back, because they're trying to figure out what they did wrong that lead them to this point.

I'm not sure about Pynchon's style. In this book, at least, he uses a lot of flashbacks, people telling other people what happened back in the day. Except he'll unleash a miniature flashback in the middle of a larger one, and all of this made it difficult at times for me to keep the flow of what happened when. I find if I focus on just one character (say DL), I can form a generally coherent timeline for them, based on the different flashbacks. But getting everyone's lives lined up is a bit trickier. And I don't think we ever do learn who the guys that came after Takeshi on the jetliner were, or why he needed to use a wig and pretend to be part of the airplane lounge band (the band was essentially Zoyd) when he apparently had some sort of Predator-style camouflage generator.