Vineland

Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern tale of life set in the United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election. Its central locale is Vineland, California, a fictional small town in California's Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon Boonville). The novel describes fascist traits as related to the Nixonian repression, and its culmination in the War on drugs. The novel comments on the slide from the free spirit of the... more

Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern tale of life set in the United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election. Its central locale is Vineland, California, a fictional small town in California's Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon Boonville). The novel describes fascist traits as related to the Nixonian repression, and its culmination in the War on drugs. The novel comments on the slide from the free spirit of the sixties to the fascist eighties. The title Vineland may be a play on the word "Hollywood", a reference to the first Viking settlement in North America, Vinland, or a reference to Andrey Vinelander, a character in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Still others contend that the title refers to Vineland, New Jersey or a "Vinland the Good" mentioned in a Frank O'Hara poem. However, the most obvious explanation is that the title is a reference to the area in which the novel is set, which is near California's grapevine-filled... less