Thomas Pynchon is the author of
V., The Crying of Lot 49,
Gravity's Rainbow,
Slow Learner, a collection of short stories,
Mason and Dixon,
Against the Day and
Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for
Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
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.).
A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly homeVintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable eruditionA essential novel of our
fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980sHis descriptive powers are breathtaking...Pynchon proves once again to be the master of what might be called the highbrow conspiracy thrillerOne of the funniest, most cleverly written, superbly characterised and beautifully structured books that I have read by a living author
