Vineland

:This article is about the novel. For towns of the same name, see Vineland, Minnesota and Vineland, New Jersey. For the Viking colony, see Vinland.

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Vineland is a 1990 book by Thomas Pynchon. Like most of Pynchon's work, it is postmodern. The book's subject matter is hippies living in Boonville, California, a small town in California's Anderson Valley. Some say the title, Vineland is a play on the word "Hollywood." Others contend that the title refers to the first Viking civilization of Vinland in North America. Still others contend that the title refers to Vineland, New Jersey, the hometown of Patti Smith.

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Vineland disappointed the many critics and readers who waited almost twenty years since Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. In contrast to Pynchon's earlier works, Vineland was overtly political and polemical, as if Pynchon, disgusted with Reaganomics, penned an angry modern adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the other hand, one reviewer argues,

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:But such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized.

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Politics aside, Pynchon's technique is still recognizable: from a cameo of Mucho Maas (from The Crying of Lot 49) to a bizarre episode hinting at Godzilla, Pynchon's "zaniness" pervades the novel. Some readers contend that Vineland, unlike what its detractors argue, does not take itself seriously enough to be leftist literature.

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Vineland, Minnesota: Vineland is an unincorporated town and census-designated place (CDP) located in Mille Lacs County, Minnesota. As of the 2000 census, the CDP had a total population of 607. As with other CDPs, the area and population values are included in aggregate values for its township....

Vineland, New Jersey: Vineland is a city located in Cumberland County, New Jersey. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 56,271. The City of Vineland is governed under the Faulkner Act (Mayor-Council) system of municipal government. Vineland is the largest city by square milage in New Jersey....

Viking: The name Viking is a borrowed word from the native Scandinavian term for the Norse warriors who raided the coasts of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and other parts of Europe from the late 8th century to the 11th century. Vikings traveled to the west and Varangians to the east. This period of Europe...

Vineland related Images and Photos (experimental)

Leif Erikssen Off the Coast of Vineland in a Viking Landing Boat