Vineland takes place in a fictional stretch of Northern California in 1984 and follows Zoyd Wheeler, a once idealistic radical who now survives on disability checks and tries to keep life stable for his daughter, Prairie. Zoyd’s fragile peace is disrupted when his old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, resurfaces. Vond once targeted Zoyd’s former partner, Frenesi Gates, a filmmaker who became entangled with him through a mix of intimidation, seduction, and political manipulation. His return signals that old conflicts from the turbulent 1960s are rising again.
Prairie’s search for answers about her mother becomes the novel’s emotional center, and her investigation leads her into the counterculture’s forgotten corridors. She meets former revolutionaries, film collectives, and fringe communities who have scattered across the state. Their stories reveal how activism, idealism, and cultural rebellion were dismantled or co-opted by forces far more organized and relentless than they ever imagined.
The novel moves between present and past, showing how personal choices intersect with state surveillance and institutional power. Pynchon charts the collapse of the 1960s counterculture into the authoritarian trends of the Reagan era, illustrating how people who once believed in liberation adapted, compromised, or disappeared into strange Californian subcultures.
Although more intimate and comedic than Pynchon’s larger epics, Vineland still wrestles with how societies remember and suppress their own rebellious energies. It is a story about families torn apart and stitched back together, about the long shadow of political repression, and about the persistence of small pockets of resistance in a landscape shaped by control.
About the Author:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Description:
Vineland takes place in a fictional stretch of Northern California in 1984 and follows Zoyd Wheeler, a once idealistic radical who now survives on disability checks and tries to keep life stable for his daughter, Prairie. Zoyd’s fragile peace is disrupted when his old nemesis, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, resurfaces. Vond once targeted Zoyd’s former partner, Frenesi Gates, a filmmaker who became entangled with him through a mix of intimidation, seduction, and political manipulation. His return signals that old conflicts from the turbulent 1960s are rising again.
Prairie’s search for answers about her mother becomes the novel’s emotional center, and her investigation leads her into the counterculture’s forgotten corridors. She meets former revolutionaries, film collectives, and fringe communities who have scattered across the state. Their stories reveal how activism, idealism, and cultural rebellion were dismantled or co-opted by forces far more organized and relentless than they ever imagined.
The novel moves between present and past, showing how personal choices intersect with state surveillance and institutional power. Pynchon charts the collapse of the 1960s counterculture into the authoritarian trends of the Reagan era, illustrating how people who once believed in liberation adapted, compromised, or disappeared into strange Californian subcultures.
Although more intimate and comedic than Pynchon’s larger epics, Vineland still wrestles with how societies remember and suppress their own rebellious energies. It is a story about families torn apart and stitched back together, about the long shadow of political repression, and about the persistence of small pockets of resistance in a landscape shaped by control.
About the Author:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.