Reading this novel was part of an ongoing project of reading one Pynchon novel a year in chronological order of publication. Last year was Gravity’s Rainbow and hear we are a year later reading Vineland. This is my second read of Vineland, but I didn’t remember any of the book except Zoyd crashing through the window at the beginning of the book, so it felt like a first reading. Maybe I was a Thanatoid when I read it, with an attention span of a gnat, and I have returned to the land of the living.
Pynchon’s prose can be so dense at times that it is easy to miss something if your attention wanders. General advice is to push through, as you will not get everything on a first go, repeated reads can be enlightening though. I found Vineland a lot of fun. It has less characters than Gravity’s Rainbow so the only thing you needed to do is watch out for narrative shifts.
Depending on the age of the reader, this book may not be as fun to read for a younger reader as it makes so many television(tubal) references that would take research to understand.
I did find the book took a while to get used to the Pynchon style again but I hit a reading stride around page 200 onwards. Pynchon’s long sentences are really poetry presented as prose at times, and in the right of state of mind reading feels like sailing. This is why I keep coming back to Pynchon, as I have not encountered anything similar in any author.