Tag: Vineland

Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Through flashbacks by its characters, who have lived the sixties in their youth, the story accounts for the free spirit of rebellion of that decade, and describes the traits of the fascist Nixonian repression and its War on drugs that clashed with it; and it articulates the slide and transformation that occurred in American culture from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Vineland, the central locale of the novel, is a fictional small town in California’s Anderson Valley (perhaps based upon Boonville). 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…