Pynchon’s America

Vineland is a requiem for Pynchon’s sixties generation and the politics and culture it produced. It offers an America of those who have searched for self-transcendence along opposing ideological paths: the yearners for power and position who in the eighties find themselves Reaganites and the pacifist politicoes of ecstasy who, searching for deathlessness, found middle age. Each group feels betrayed in an America in which no ideology, no conviction, and no politics really matter a...