crushed by a redwood tree in the middle of a baseball game in an act of anti-labor violence

a review of Thomas Pynchon’s VINELAND

(8/31/25 - 9/1/25)

Where to begin. Well, I’m writing a book review. At the beginning of this year (2025) I finally went through the trouble of updating the hosting on this blog, and began moving some of the very few pieces I’d written since college onto the new version. I’ve since started going through and reposting the stuff I did for The Collegian (and probably will continue to work on that throughout the fall), but I also wanted to get back in the habit of writing a little bit more about the things I read/watch/etc. I really really enjoy doing the podcast with Quinn, and he keeps encouraging me to do more Mattaining Balance stuff (which would kind of hit the same “critical writing on art” part of my brain that has felt so dormant for so long), but I also just have this kind of romantic idea that I can fall backwards into restarting the sort of “once-a-week late at night 800 word media-thoughts” machine that I had built during my 18 months writing at the paper. It’s been too long since I’ve actually written, and I kind of hate using Letterboxed, so I’m going to make myself do this instead.

Anyways. At the end of July, Emily and I went to the mall so I could buy a few new pairs of shorts, because it had been at least 5 years since I’d done so, and stuff was on sale with school starting here in Chattanooga. We parked (as we always do) outside the Barnes and Noble, and took a quick loop around the sales tables on our way to the rest of the mall. At a stack labeled “DYSTOPIAS” one book jumped out at me - Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I recognized it because I’d recently learned that it was going to be the basis of the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another. This was (and is) a film I’m very much looking forward to, and Pynchon has always been one of those “important” modern American novelists that I’ve been meaning to read since about high school, when in my 2012-2013 junior year “Honors Literature” class, we read three books about how to read books by Thomas C. Foster where he repeatedly talked about The Crying of Lot 49. My vague memory of what he said (other than it being about stamps) was how great it was as an example for understanding all sorts of modern and post-modern literary devices, and the cartoonish absurdity of the world we live in. Those Foster books loom large over the way my critical apparatus works - but my guess is that if I returned to them now I’d find them incredibly clunky and unhelpful. I don’t really know a whole lot about TVTropes, but from what I have learned, I think probably Professor Foster kinda just also invented TVTropes in book form around the same time that website was launching. A real Newton-Leibniz situation.

Ok. So. I bought the book, it took me about 3ish weeks of one-or-two weeknights of readings to get through, and for about half of that time I was just intensely frustrated. This review is - in part - an attempt to work through that frustration, because I think this book is good! I also just kind of hold to this sort of protestant work ethic idea that something that was difficult to do must be worthwhile and important, or at least interesting to talk about. I’m working through that, but putting my thoughts to paper here feels like finishing the work, and closing the loop - so let’s get to it.

Plot summary first - Vineland is a novel that tells the story of aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his teenage daughter Prairie. When the book opens, it’s 1984 and the two of them are living in Vineland, a small town on the densely wooded and thematically foggy North California coast. Vineland has become a sort of last stop and magnet for surfers and burnouts to park their trailers and set up roots while fleeing the rapidly Reaganifying core of California. Strip malls are popping up, the forests are being logged, and new investment capital is rolling in to clean up the biker bars and drag everyone into the bright new financialized future of trickle-down-economics. Oh, and everyone is glued to the Tube. During Zoyd’s annually televised big public mental-health spectacle designed to illustrate that he is still unable to work - thus keeping him and Prairie on government benefits - Zoyd is contacted by DEA agent Hector Zuñiga, a guy who spent most of the 60s unsuccessfully trying to get Zoyd to rat on whoever was selling him weed. Hector lets Zoyd know that a scary figure from their past - federal prosecutor Brock Vond - is on his way to Vineland to round up Zoyd and Prairie, and take them into custody for something related to Zoyd’s long disappeared ex-wife - Prairie’s mother - Frenesi Gates. Brock soon arrives with an army in tow, blows up the Wheeler house, and scares away their dog. Zoyd scrambles to get out of town, sending Prairie off in the other direction to hide out with her boyfriend’s crappy punk band until they can all figure out what’s going on.

We spend maybe a chapter or two with Zoyd, sadly reminiscing on his limited understanding of who Frenesi was (some sort of radical filmmaker?), and getting some really good pining after a lost love, mixed with a quick short story about being a keyboard player on a Hawaiian themed novelty airline that was regularly attacked by sky pirates. The narrative then shifts to Prairie’s perspective: she’s quickly picked up by a sexy lady ninja named Daryl Louise (DL), one of her mother’s old friends from radical film collective 24fps. DL takes Prairie step by step through a long and complicated history of who her mother really was, and why Brock Vond is back now, complete with some screenings of the POV footage Frenesi shot during a doomed student uprising at the Trasero County College of the Surf. Frenesi’s story is intercut with some extremely tedious side stories about DL’s time training to become the angstiest and sexiest lady ninja you’ve ever heard of, her encounters with a Japanese insurance businessman named Takeshi, and their eventual partnership to form a karmic adjustment agency for confused ghosts called “thanatoids” that are trapped in a town in the woods not far from Zoyd and Prairie’s home in Vineland.

What we learn about Frenesi is this: a sucker for a man in uniform - she fell in love with Vond, a constant oppositional fixture at the sort of actions against the state that 24fps documented and participated in. Vond used Frenesi to undermine and topple the student movement at the College of the Surf, which imploded when Frenesi provided a gun that was used to kill the movement’s charismatic leader/messiah-figure. Vond - now obsessed with Frenesi - took her into custody in a top-secret concentration camp squirreled away in one of the secret empty parts of central California where she remained - perhaps willingly - until DL rescued her. Frenesi stumbled into Zoyd somewhere around San Diego, and the two engaged in a loving but shallow marriage, with Frenesi always pining away after Vond. After Prairie’s birth, Vond rounded the young family up, and allowed Zoyd to leave with his daughter, with the understanding that Frenesi would go with Brock, and he would keep Zoyd and Prairie under surveillance to ensure they made no attempt to find her. Frenesi’s mother Sasha suggests that they move up to Vineland, an old Gates family camping spot that Frenesi was always drawn to. Maybe someday she’ll cycle back around, and the two of them could be there waiting for her.

And now we’re back in the present. A few years of aggressive public budget cuts and privatization have meant the end of a bunch of federal government programs. All of the funding for Brock’s toys and guns and informants is being taken away, and everything’s going back to the way it was. Everyone is converging on Vineland. Prairie finds her way back to Zoyd at this year’s annual Gates Family reunion, and Frenesi re-emerges into the narrative, an object of sadness, fascination, and obsession, but not really of substance. Brock zooms in on a helicopter to try to assert his control and snatch everyone away one more time, but he’s forced to leave when he literally runs out of gas money - Reagan has deemed the whole thing an embarrassing expense. It’s time to give up on that old dream, or just become another ghost in the woods. We close on an image of Prairie, still a bit confused over this whole thing, thinking about those ghosts - who her parents were, what Brock wanted from them, and what all that could mean for her. And then - her lost dog - a spitting image of its mother - comes sauntering out of the trees.

That got away from me a little bit - but I don’t know! I feel like that’s the minimum viable product for this story. I’ve caught myself saying a few times that the plot is very simple - and I think that’s true, because not a whole lot happens - but I think so much of this book is in the complex details; the texture, the flavor, the rough edges, even the ridiculous character and place names and pop-cultural references. And those are the things I like. I like our main viewpoint characters (Zoyd and Prairie) and I like almost every single secondary character we get - because most of the time, we are introduced to them in a sort of exhaustive detail-oriented maelstrom. Vineland does this really neat thing - particularly in the first chapters about Frenesi - where in addition to personal backstory, we telescope out and get genealogical history. Sure, Frenesi is a flowery California hippie with a romantic conception of the power of truth and film, but her parents - Sasha and Hub - were blacklisted pinko Hollywood script doctors and gaffers with romantic ideas about the good that even compromised unions could do. And Sasha’s parents were dyed in the wool red-blooded International Workers of the World aligned loggers: wobblies with romantic ideas about actual physical Labor violence with a capital L. Throw some grenades at Pinkertons, get your legs crushed by a falling redwood tree during the middle of a baseball game. Happy Labor Day. Everyone and everything and every tree in the forest comes from somewhere, and Vineland gives us this sort of long-term cross-section of what it means/meant to be leftist in California, and how that got diluted and carved out over time. And that’s just in one character backstory! We get this sort of thing in all of them!

This is a generational epic about ideological purity, and it’s a California novel - which means that it’s also about music, and movies, and TV and what they’re all doing to us. (The book does not think that the things they are doing are good! Especially TV!) I think that with that framing in mind, it has a lot of good ideas that often get caught in the sort of neon-flashing maximalist language that Pynchon uses, with constant references to specific shows and films (complete with release years in parentheticals) and songs (sung out in full excruciating detail every time) flying at us at breakneck speed. Some of those references are strong enough in their effect, but others have unfortunately gotten too dated or convoluted to work. Near the end, in one of the highlights of the book, Frenesi gets a really affecting vision of a character’s impending death - but I nearly missed the full punch of the moment because I wasn’t immediately familiar with the oblique way in which Pynchon references the old “the worms march in/the worms march out/the worms play pinochle on your snout” bit. There’s a whole fan-wiki that exists to explain every reference made on every page of this book. To me, that indicates a pretty massive failure on the part of the work. This is a book that’s clever more than it is smart, a book that’s silly more than it is funny, and that works against it at every turn. It feels like watching a dramatic film that’s constantly cutting to TikToks of a guy doing more and more complicated backflips. Sure it’s a cool trick, but what’s the point? Why did we spend one-hundred-and-ten full pages on the bit about the sexy lady ninja? I get the sense from the little bit of review reading that I’ve done that this is one of the less popular Pynchon books, so I’m probably just preaching to the choir with all this criticism, but I had to fight through large portions of the middle just to get back to the interesting bits, and the book wasn’t even that long!

Ok. Almost there. Let’s do one more paragraph on stuff I liked. I can immediately see why PTA chose to adapt this book, even loosely. There are so many little specific details and turns of phrase building out this world that I just find absolutely charming. I clung to every second that we spent with Zoyd in crappy bars, watching weird local commercials for BDSM tinted lawncare companies and Buddhist themed pizza places. I wish there was more of that kind of stuff and less of some of the others! I know there’s no accounting for taste, but I just really despised the sexy lady ninja stuff. Another thing I loved - the thanatoids: this idea of a specifically yuppie California flavor of ghost so apathetic about death that it just kind of seems unable to cling to them. There’s some really wonderful description around the town - I think called Shade Canyon - where they all live, about the way light can’t quite hit all the shadows cast by its weird trees and buildings; things just kind of get lost there. It’s good!

Last big point in Vineland’s favor: Brock Vond. What a good villain! I love that characters are just constantly referring to him as “the prosecutor.” It’s a big move to have a character that you can just blame all of Nixon-era COINTELPRO and then Reagan-era War on Drugs on, but it works! All of the evil of the federal government swirls around this one weird little guy, who is simultaneously sex-obsessed and repulsed, and helplessly infatuated with the type of person he claims to hate. A big bad authority figure who refers to the activists of the hippie movement as misguided children, but is himself a lost boy searching for approval in an arbitrary and bureaucratic system that doesn’t even consider him. I’ve complained already that a lot of the stuff in this book is pretty dated, but I think Brock’s whole deal - especially his interest in phrenology and deep consideration of things like “the criminal face” is so forward looking. Alt-Right guys on Twitter today are just doing this bit unironically! They love phrenology!

The ways in which this story still feels relevant stack up in every fed character and plotline we get. Aside from Brock, we’re treated via Hector to the type of mean and stupid federal agent constantly self-mythologizing their own heroism through the language of film and TV - which I find particularly resonant when our current Secretary of Homeland Security is doing everything she can to make her war on immigrants into reality TV. There’s a lot of good stuff in this book about top secret concentration camps that the US government is explicitly using to disappear citizens that they consider to be enemies of the state. There are some really incredible paragraphs about the secret and sinister back offices from which psy-ops and mind poison (physical, mental, and dental) spring upon our main characters, and one really great sentence about a just-out-of-sight third highway that runs somehow directly parallel to all known roads, and leads straight into those right-in-plain-view compounds, surrounded by barbed wire, just waiting to be filled. Pynchon does an excellent job of laying the tracks from the US moves against foreign communist enemies in the Red Scare and the Cold War, to the inevitable way that these tactics would be turned towards its own - either in a prefiguration of further action abroad, or as a perfected strategy finally ready for use at home in the war on communism, terrorism, drugs, whatever. Zoyd thinks more than once - grimly - about how whenever it’s time for the marijuana to be harvested, the Pacific Northwest becomes just another enemy country under the full assault of America’s military machinery. Good!!!

Anyways. I missed some fascinating stuff about the computer, and about this book’s really kind of regressive and slut-shamey views about what I’d describe as “the treachery of women.” I don’t know how much of that is par for the course for Pynchon, and/if how much of it will show up elsewhere - but it felt significant enough to note here, even if I didn’t get into it fully. (I’ll probably read The Crying of Lot 49 soon - I found a used copy up in Chicago last week.) I think that just about wraps up my thoughts on this book - so I’ll close out here, Vineland is a 3 out of 5 star book, and I bet that movie is gonna be good. Thank you for reading all the way to the end, have a good one. Matt out.