Review of the Day: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

In an article celebrating the author’s 82nd birthday in 2019, Adrian McKinty summed the book up as:

Northern California and America in the early 1980s. Reagan, Star Wars, George Lucas, Brock Vond. Big pop culture and literary hits and most people should be able to get the refs. Lot 49, Inherent Vice, Vineland, and Bleeding Edge form a kind of paranoid alternative history contemporary quartet that should be accessible to most general readers. 

Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof (p. 3).

It wasn’t just that his folks were vegetarians they also discriminated among vegetables, excluding from their diet everything red, for example, the color of anger. Most bread, having been made by killing yeasts, was taboo (p. 20).

Hector slumped in zomoskepsis, or the contemplation of his soup (p. 31).

”Never eat anything that glows,” pronounced Mrs. Lo FInto, an Italian mother who not only couldn’t cook but actually suffered clinical kouxinaphobiam or fear of kitchens, her assignment back herre being part of her therapy (p. 190).

What do you call a Thanatoid with ‘Sir’ in front of his name? Knight of the Living Dead! How many Thanatoids’s it take to screw in a lightbulb? None — it gets too hot in there! What does a Thanatoid do on Halloween? Puts a fruit bowl on his head, two straws up his nose, and goes as a Zombie!

Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity… (p. 265).

Accoriding to Vato Gomez, one of the heavy-dutiest of Mexican curses goes, “May your life be full of lawyers” (p. 359).

kindle and Audible audioboook. 398 pgs. 25 June 2025