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Vineland

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Vineland

By: Thomas Pynchon
Narrated by: Graham Winton
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About this listen

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 '60s 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 sports car scene in V.).

©1990 Thomas Pynchon (P)2018 Recorded Books Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Great Plains Imperial Japan

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Not sure I entirely followed everything that happened in this story of a washed up hippy generation dealing with the Reaganite eighties, but I mostly enjoyed the ride. Pynchon's prose is dense, archly constructed but also free-wheeling and funny. He goes off on elliptical tangents, so it's easy to lose a thread, but all those loose threads are somehow woven together to form a brightly tie-dyed, hemp-smelling cloth.

Funny but dense

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I feel Vineland has all the elements you expect from Pynchon: quirk, interesting characters, a little conspiracy and Americana combined — just none in their best iteration for him.

The narrator also fits well, but I can’t say I find his voice enjoyable to listen to, so that was another just-off-the-mark element that left me unfulfilled.

All that said, it is still a quality novel compared to 99.99% of modern fiction — I think I just had higher expectations.

Less than the sum of its very Pynchon parts

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