Just Following Up: Vineland

Thomas Pynchon's baked follow up to Gravity's Rainbow gets a reappraisal

Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t just a tough act to follow; it might just be impossible to write a novel after Gravity’s Rainbow because Gravity’s Rainbow enacts the end of the novel itself, a V-2 rocket straight to the whole creaky edifice. The book was a wild success, a (shared) National Book Award winner – Pynchon sent a hack comic in his place to give the acceptance speech – and a Pulitzer Prize winner (even if the Pulitzer Board rejected their judges’ recommendation to give the prize to the book). It’s a big shambling thing, standing alongside Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved as The Great American Novels of the 20th Century. But, again, it is also the end of The Great American Novel, or all novels, or all civilization. Ulysses ends with “yes I said yes I will Yes” and Mrs. Dalloway with “For there she was,” and Gravity’s Rainbow enacts the reverse of those affirmative exhortations with its final “Now, everybody –” a last communal gasp before annihilation. That suggestive em-dash was where everyone was left for another seventeen years as Thomas Pynchon figured out, what, exactly, could come next. After a collection of his early work was released in 1984, Pynchon finally came out with Vineland in 1990, leaving many baffled.

This was the next book? Vineland? This shaggy dog stoner tragi-comedy was the novel after Gravity’s Rainbow? Not everyone was off board – Salman Rushdie called it “a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years,” and Frank McConnell called it a “book that will make this world - our world, our daily, chemical-preservative, plastic-wrapped bread - a little more tolerable, a little more human” – but the general vibe was something like: what the fuck? D.T. Max, in his biography of David Foster Wallace, reports that Foster Wallace read the book and “discovered his love for Thomas Pynchon was gone,” and Foster Wallace himself wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen that Vineland was “flat and strained and heartbreakingly inferior to [Pynchon’s] other 3 novels.” And that was from a guy who basically owed his career to ripping off Pynchon! Frank Kermode professed utter confusion in the London Review of Books – “After two readings I am still not quite sure of the story-line; and not quite sure whether it isn’t naive or wicked to want to be sure” – and Brad Leithauser in the New York Review of Books called it “a loosely packed grab bag of a book” and wondered “[f]or whom is this intended?” If The Paris Review had chimed in, we could’ve had a truly multipolar piling on of Vineland; New York and London will have to do.