March 2025: Re-reading Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990)
Plus the (slight) return of Les Fauves
D.E.A.R. • Some books you only read once. Their stories either stay with you forever or leave your mind and memory, permanently. Others, just like particular types of wine, food or holiday destination, compel you to return, often many times, even if the gaps between readings stretch to years. Vineland (1990), a novel by the arch-paranoid American author Thomas Pynchon, is one of the books I keep coming back to. And I just finished re-reading it—yet again.
I had never even heard of Pynchon the day I walked into the University of Sydney Coop bookshop as a first-year undergraduate. I was intending to pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon’s shortest—and arguably funniest—novel, which was on the reading list for English 1. But a big pile of (heavily discounted) paperback copies of Vineland caught my attention, and from memory I ended up buying both.
Vineland is set in 1984, during the Los Angeles Olympics (although the jetpacks and protofascist trumpets and the rest are never mentioned) and in the lead-up to US president Ronald Regan’s re-election. The opening chapters, set in the redwood forests of northern California, also mention Return of the Jedi (1983), parts of which were filmed in those woods. As such, it is a quintessential 1980s novel, but its backstory—and emotional core—is the political events of the late 1960s, including the co-option of the counterculture by US authorities.
I didn’t realise at the time that I had bought the UK edition, the cover of which features a collage by an artist named Stephen Martin, rather than the US edition, which features a black-and-white 1936 photograph of a partly-logged and seemingly on fire mountaintop near Seattle by American photographer Darius Kinsey. While the latter is probably more suited to a novel about 1960s counterculture in California, for my mind it lacks the overarching political sentiments of Martin’s collage.
Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 should be considered related novels. Together with 2009’s Inherent Vice, they could even be said to form a trilogy. All three books spend an inordinate amount of time satirising US West Coast tropes—LA freeways, 1960s debauchery, acid-fuelled paranoia etc. Despite—or maybe just because—The Crying of Lot 49 was written in the early 1960s, it still stands up today as a classic postmodern novel. Inherent Vice, not so much. But I enjoyed Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 film remake.
Vineland has postomdernism in spades, too. My absolute favourite line in the novel comes during the wedding of Gelsomina Wayvone, the daughter of mafia boss Ralph Wayvone, when the imposter house band, Billy Barf and the Vomitones, run out of Italian songs and reach for the Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze & Guattari. This reference to the postmodernist authors of Mille plateaux [A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980] still absolutely kills me.
In fact, Vineland is a happy hunting ground for anyone who enjoys obscure pop cultural references (to music, film, cartoons, television), made-up song lyrics (about ukuleles, uzis and actor William Powell) or fictional movies and shows, including Young Kissinger starring Woody Allen (presumably in the title role) and a bizarre television show about the Bostin Celtics basketball team starring Paul McCartney as Kevin McHale and Sean Penn as Larry Bird.
I could go on.
I may well do so at some point.
Reading Vineland for the umpteenth time, I asked (or maybe ‘aksed’) myself the same question I asked all those other times: how the heck did Pynchon come up with all of this stuff, and how could he even know so much about popular culture, including the chipmunks? Who is this guy? Like I do with all writers whose work I admire, I also replayed the feeling I had every time I read Vineland: why can’t I be this guy?
In other words: I wanted to write like Thomas Pynchon, and maybe I always have. The only problem with this sentiment is that, just like the protagonist of Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939; PDF), I would have to live Pynchon’s entire life in order to even begin to approximate his style; and he’s not even dead yet. Part of this process would involve re-reading his works over and over again in the vain hope that I might be able to reproduce one or more lines—authentically, of course.
Which is part of the problem with re-reading in general. It’s also, arguably, just a massive waste of time. Self-indulgent, even. Because every minute (or more like month, in this case) I spend reading Pynchon’s work is a minute (or month) I do not spend reading other books that might help me develop a more original—or, at least, authentic—style of my own. Not to mention the actual writing time foregone in the pursuit of my own unreachable goals.
Maybe I can take some comfort from the fact that one of my poems about Pynchon, “Thomas Pynchon and the Art of Anonymity Maintenance”, which first appeared in my chapbook The Happy Farang (2000) and was also published in Meanjin in 2004, has been included in a bibliography published as part of Pynchon Notes (PDF). Seriously!
And then, of course, there’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s “re-make” of Vineland, One Battle After Another, to look forward to.
But if I were to really write about Vineland now, in the present dispensation, I would say that it is a deeply prophetic book. Because by looking back at the “American Dream” as dreamt by a succession of US presidents including Nixon, Reagan and the rest, it also makes it possible to place the gobshite currently occupying that position in proper context: as the head of an empire that has always done what it wants, and believes it will always get its way.
Anyway, perhaps this will be the last time I re-read Vineland. Even if, as on previous occasions, I’ve read passages I could have sworn weren’t even there the first time I read it. And even if, unsurprisingly, reading the opening chapters of the book fill me with a comfy feeling of nostalgia not entirely dissimilar to hearing Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973), a concept album my father first introduced me to at an early age while living on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia.
Instead, I’ve decided for the moment to focus on reading “easier” novels, as a kind of palate cleanser and circuit breaker. If I can get the idea of being Thomas Pynchon out of my system for good, I might just be able to return my focus to the fiction project I’ve been working on for the past five years. Some of you may remember me writing to you about it several years ago when this newsletter was on Mailchimp.
More on that soon, I hope.
Or, at least, sooner than if I were to instead re-read one of Pynchon’s really long books, like Against the Day (2006), which is 1085 pages long. Just for comparison, yesterday I sat down and read Personal, a Jack Reacher novel (in the first person!) by Lee Child, in just over one day. I don’t think I’ll ever need to read that one again. Then again, will it stay with me? Only time will tell.
LES FAUVES • Speaking of time, it stretches and mutates and sometimes flows backwards. My participation in the ongoing Fauves Are the Best People podcast has caused me to reflect on times past and persons I may once have been. And as the podcast moves from the band’s early days to its ‘commercial peak’, I’ve also reassessed my own relationship with their music—and myself.
In this context, it’s been great to find Dave Graney writing here on Substack, and particularly his recent interview with The Fauves. I can only dream of having a voice—and stage presence—as silky smooth and gently ironic as Graney’s. And that’s probably why I can’t even bring myself to listen to the recent Fauves Are the Best People episodes in which my insights have either cameo-ed or featured.
But if you’re interested, please consider my hot-takes about three songs from 1996’s Future Spa LP: “Big Brother Age”, “Don’t Get Death Threats Anymore” and “Self-Abuser”. And if you’re feeling really game, settle in for all 68 minutes of episode 100, dedicated to the song “Skateboard World Record”, in which I waffle on with host Jay Bam about landspeed records, Hüsker Dü and my “opening riff repeated after the first chorus sounds even more awesome the second time around” rule.
SOUNDS • Finally, last week’s post about my return to Ballyhahill in County Limerick—and specifically to the village pub, Barr na sraide—prompted my dad to send me a link to this song by Muhammad Al-Hussaini. Enjoy!
As ever, if there’s a specific topic you’d like me to cover in a future post, please feel free to leave a comment (if you’re reading on Substack), reply directly to this message (if you’re receiving the newsletter via email) or else contact me the old-fashioned way at davey@daveydreamnation.com.
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All the best and bye for now,
Davey
