[In the following review, Tabbi criticizes Pynchon's artistic complacency in Vineland.]

As long as the novel remains a popular medium, it is probably inevitable that readers should regard the artist before the work of art, and tend to celebrate the performing, rather than the creative, personality. An abdication as extreme as Thomas Pynchon's only proves the rule. He has given no interviews and made no public appearances, personal friends keep quiet, and there are only a scattering of photographs from the 1953 Oyster Bay High School yearbook that editors, in an act of pure revenge, have kept reprinting in feature articles and national reviews. For someone of Pynchon's stature, the sheer effort of maintaining anonymity has to be an occupation in itself, and reason enough to avoid publication for seventeen years.

Now that Vineland has appeared, however, it is clear that the most strenuous public relations campaign could not have stimulated as much interest. Nearly everything leading up to the appearance—the long wait, the award to the author some years previously of a MacArthur grant, and the secrecy in which Little. Brown cloaked the manuscript—worked to ensure its being read and reviewed, like any novel of note today in America, as news. Clinching the American reception was Salman Rushdie's front-page review in the New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1990), a message direct from the underground pronouncing the voluntary exile's literary return a "triumph." Dissenting reviews by Frank Kermode and Brad Leithauser registered a cooler international reception, but this has not kept academic critics here from taking up the novel's explication and getting started on the inevitable revisions of the Pynchon canon. Within a year of publication, there are already the beginnings of a Vineland industry, and it is against this large and continuing response that the novel itself will have to be understood.

Now more than ever Pynchon, by avoiding publicity, has created it, and, whatever his intentions, by his own elusiveness he has helped to serve the celebrity function of literature. The difference this time, though, is that the work would appear to rest comfortably in its publicity, offering very little in the way of critical resistance to the cultural climate in which it appears. We are used to hearing about media depredations on literary talent; about Norman Mailer's having been ruined, for example, by his wasted efforts either to change or live up to his public image. But I wonder if reticence might not have its own price. At its worst, self-promotion in Mailer has been a way at least of making contact with an audience, and of testing its reality. Yet it is hard to know for whom, precisely, Vineland was intended, unless it be for the very audience that, through demographic studies and proven interest, the media and the marketplace have themselves created and sustained. With its laid-back style, American matter, and deliberately conventional sixties nostalgia, the novel is all too easily placeable in the field of current writing. And this is neither a sell-out nor an especially welcome bid for "accessibility" so much as an imaginative short-cut on Pynchon's part, an acceptance of a ready-made audience that frees him from the responsibility of creating the sensibility by which he will be understood.

My dissatisfaction with Vineland is not that the book is a falling off—"what wouldn't be," was a friend's fair response. After Gravity's Rainbow, a direct treatment and "return home" to America does make a kind of sense. But for the reader who has been moved by complexities of form and language beyond the alienation depicted in Gravity's Rainbow, the return can seem imperfectly achieved, the new optimism arbitrary, settled in advance, and sustainable only by an almost willed holding back from darker forces and paranoia that still come obscurely through. A relaxation of tension is apparent in the way that Pynchon allows the language and mannerisms of the time and place—mostly Northern California in the sixties and the eighties—to shape his own style; and, where he had often been accused in the earlier novels of creating cold, abstract characters (they are not), now there is an evident and mostly unironic fondness for all but the cops (and even for some of them) that has led many to believe that this, at last, is Pynchon's true face: an Old Lefty nostalgic for the lost radical history of Pacific Northwestern logger unions and Wobblie politics, and who is willing to assert, against all the coopted radicalism, fallen ideals, and unfulfilled "acid adventures" of the sixties, a positive sense of community with his contemporaries.

His loyalties are political and generational rather than literary, as they always have been. But the left wing politics don't quite sit with a new, right-leaning aesthetic. In two recent semi-autobiographical essays introducing his own and his college friend Richard Farina's apprentice work, he showed signs of dissatisfaction with the flashy technique and experimental difficulty of his writing. After taking pains to criticize the short story, "Entropy," an early show-off piece that remains nonetheless a good introduction to Pynchon's abstract imagination, he spoke of preferring fiction that has some "grounding in human reality" and an authenticity "found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live." This change in attitude may account for the new attention to scenes of family life and general suburban ordinariness of the people of Vineland (even when they happen to be undercover agents, ex-anarchist bombers, or a bad-ass woman warrior like DL Chastain). Gone are the abstract epistemological quests that, for many, made the earlier novels such attractive allegories of contemporary reading, whose main characters are acutely aware of themselves as makers and interpreters of signs, and who because not conventionally "full" or "real" have been thought to be only elements in a game. Like Stencil in his first novel, V., Pynchon must surely have seen the likelihood of his work being turned into "merely a scholarly quest after all, an adventure of the mind." The demands made by the earlier work may have selected a more cerebral audience than he ever wanted, and the anti-intellectual rhetoric of the prefaces, like the populist language and mock scholarly references in Vineland, seem designed to reach a wider audience, and to defend the work against the allegorizing critics.

In keeping with the new realism, the quest this time is less formally self-conscious, more personal and direct: a young girl, Prairie Gates, after years of separation comes to learn about her mother, Frenesi, and in the process is given a pretty good American political education. Frenesi lost the upbringing of her daughter in the early seventies when, having betrayed her radical friends to the Drug Enforcement Agency, she leaves her family home in Vineland for the security and protective anonymity of a bureaucratic career in the government. To Pynchon's credit, the betrayal is sought not in any simple rejection by Frenesi of her youthful ideals (which are shown to have been vague and naive at best), but in the larger spirit of sixties radicalism—most obviously in the cult of youth, but more subtly in a generation's unthinking embrace of media and technologies that set life at a distance. Even during her most idealistic years at Berkeley, Frenesi had sought a kind of immunity in film work, imagining that "as long as she had life inside her Tube-shaped frame,… nothing out there could harm her." The government offers merely another kind of immunity, one that seems neverending until her budget is cut and she not only loses her job, but—in ironic confirmation of her already lost identity—she has her entire file erased from the Agency's computer.

We could welcome the story as a domestic gloss on the earlier novels, a gloss that reduces, to be sure, but that does serve to correct our overly literary and de-politicized readings of Pynchon. The injunction to "be experimental" can be as much of a trap as any other creative prescription, and he can hardly be blamed for choosing not to push the limits of his art. Yet, for all the reputed ease and accessibility, he can't resist giving his own, indeterminate twist to his popular and realistic material, and the hybrid fiction that results has neither the emotional charge of realism nor the rich fabulism and science-based clarities of the earlier, more overtly experimental work. For long stretches the novel resembles nothing so much as recent cyberpunk fiction in which the deepest, most "shared levels of the life we all really live" are often hard to separate from the collective reality of brand names, corporations, and network television. If Gravity's Rainbow engendered a taste for technological complexities and multiple otherworldly bureaucracies in a younger science fiction writer such as William Gibson, there is now, in Vineland, a hint of Gibson in the ninjette training of the young DL Chastain, and in the subtle alterations, made in bed and on the operating table, to Takeshi Fumimota's nervous system. Here is the same mixture, as in Gibson, of a mock oriental mysticism (Chastain has touched the Japanese businessman with the Fatal Palm, which will cause instant death exactly one year later) and an equivalent, simulated mysticism in the West (Fumimota can be cured only by the most advanced procedures, involving endless use of the most costly medical equipment). A society of half-alive "Thanatoids" living on junk food and television re-runs are also reminiscent of Gibson's "flatliners" and of other technological "constructs" of once living personalities. Yet the Thanatoids, too, were anticipated in the final scattering of Tyrone Slothrop in a passage from Gravity's Rainbow that gestures, as Christopher Walker has remarked, toward Pynchon's "own disillusionment with the whole novelistic project":

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop … and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A. E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb; they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too, yes yes nothing like getting the 3 of Pentacles upside down covering the significator on the second try to send you to the tube to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo Show, light a cigarette and try to forget the whole thing)—to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm.

It may be, as Walker suggests, that "Vineland is the fruit of this tubal immersion," and that the form of the TV rerun has to an extent replaced "the logic of quest, knowledge and apocalyptic revelation" in the first three novels. Yet this passage also reveals Pynchon in the earlier work as a writer who is capable of questioning his own plots, metaphors, and quests, so as to constantly resist the apocalypse he imagines. The endless replication in Vineland of already known forms, like the cyberpunk's retro-future in which the end seems to have already come, can only make any further resistance seem pointless. Pynchon has been criticized for indulging an easy cold war rhetoric, but the apocalyptic threat could at least make us feel the present urgencies that impel us to act. Slothrop's scattering, described elsewhere in Gravity's Rainbow as a mindless collapse into a wholly discontinuous present, was in part a way of showing what can happen when we stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. The Thanatoids, existing "safe in some time free zone" of their own choosing, take this a historical mindlessness a step further—into the age of Star Wars and the postmodern eighties.

Whatever the differences between this novel and the last, Pynchon shows no sign of diminishing inventiveness, although the Thanatoid and Chastain/Fumimota subplots, evolving to the complexity of a suburban sprawl, only incidentally touch on the central story of Prairie and Frenesi. In the absence of the deferred apocalyptic moment, that story is even less compelling. A number of readers have expressed disappointment with the anticlimax of the last chapter when, for the first time after some 350 pages of preparation, the mother and daughter finally meet. From the little we are told about it, Prairie seems to have felt more emotion in long sessions of watching Frenesi on film. And if comments on clothes and hairstyle had recently given the exact right emotional coloring to the parting, probably for good, of Prairie and a teenage friend, they don't quite play in this much more important encounter. Despite the betrayals and adult experience she has been through, there is little about Frenesi that has changed since the sixties, even if the imagery that describes her refers not only to film now, but to the "falsely deathless perimeter" of a video screen. Her loss of immunity and corporate identity, and a suspect promise of a role in a movie, are all, really, that bring her home to Vineland.

Of course, there is also the presence of DEA agent Brock Vond to bring her back. Vond is the cartoon bad-guy who got Frenesi to come over to his side in the first place, which he accomplished mainly through the force of his sex. Now it is true that sex and power have always been connected in Pynchon's work, but never so bluntly, and without entering into a Vond-like fantasy of macho attractiveness, what reader, male or female, would accept Frenesi's plea of helplessness whenever her "pussy's running the show"? Even less satisfying is the bad joking arbitrariness with which Prairie is rescued from Vond at the novel's end, when, after his magical disappearance, even she is not sure she wanted to be rescued. Brock, descending on a helicopter cable to grab the girl out of her sleeping bag, is yanked back at the last second when the Reagan administration suddenly defunds his program; then he is carried off to hell. And this is how, in the post-ideological eighties, even the prototypal agent of oppression is made subject to the same economic contingencies as the rest of us.

Maybe it is to be expected that Pynchon, working closer than ever to conventional novelistic forms and evoking conventional expectations, would subvert them. But with our expectations Pynchon also raises significant political concerns that are later dropped with the same nonchalance. The novel purports to be about a generation's missed chances, about its addictions and betrayals, and about its replacement, among the educated classes, of an uptight morality and blatant racial prejudice with more subtle forms of mental and economic oppression (there is a running satirical commentary on television, yuppies, and New Age music). Pynchon's refusal to push the narrative to some plausible formal conclusion drains these issues, again, of any felt urgency; and the slapdash, indeterminate ending left me doubting the seriousness of his project in the book.

But then it is not at all clear that he wants to be taken seriously, at least not with the kind of seriousness that scholars and admiring critics have brought to the study of his work. Ever since the appearance of Gravity's Rainbow, many people have worked very hard to get at Pynchon's accomplishment, and to make its importance more widely felt. It is this critical group, myself included, that Vineland is most likely to have disappointed, even if, academic industry being what it is, there will continue to be those among us who will go on tracking Vineland arcana and the minutest allusive droppings without asking whether the work this time will bear the scrutiny. The famous assertion in Gravity's Rainbow that "everything is connected, everything in the Creation," offers a certain justification for the mass of critical explication devoted to that novel, if only in nervous and prolific denial of the less frequently cited counter-assertion that "nothing is connected to anything." But is Vineland better for our knowing, say, that a minor character named Van Meter might refer to Bob Feller, the great Cleveland Indians pitcher known throughout the nation at the age of 17 as "the farmboy from Van Meter," Iowa? Or that Frenesi's relative, Eula, may have been named after Eula Varner in Faulkner's Snopes novels? Might the appearance on page 97 of an Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari, open up a whole psychic subtext? (More relevant may be the surname of one Weed Atman, the influence of Hindu Religion on Vineland having been noted in at least one review.)

Pynchon's attitude toward his interpreters might be gathered from his introduction, at the start of the book, of the character Zoyd Wheeler, who must do something certifiably crazy at least once a year if he is to continue to receive his "mental disability" checks from the Government. Zoyd's dangerous leaps through the front windows of various establishments in Vineland County are filmed every year by local television crews and subjected to endless scrutiny by panels of experts, the most recent "including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track-and-field coach … discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd's technique." Pynchon is nothing if not self-conscious, and, in the passage describing Zoyd's reluctant leap, through a window whose glass turns out to have been replaced by a pane of "clear sheet candy," he could be summing up the effect that intense critical exposure in a culture sustained by media simulations has had on his own style in the book:

[Zoyd] knew the instant he hit that something was funny. There was hardly any impact, and it all felt and sounded different, no spring or resonance, no volume, only a sort of fine, dulled splintering.

At the start of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon taunted us with one of the most brilliant author figures in recent fiction—Pirate Prentice, a kind of fantasist surrogate whose novelistic powers of dreaming other peoples' dreams are all too readily put into service by the "Firm" and the State. Prentice knows that his talents, his body, and even his own private fantasies are subtly implicated in sources of power within the culture; and his eventual initiation into a political "Counterforce" and social "We-system" (as against a decentered and relational "They-system") is a study in power and compromised resistance that rivals and anticipates Foucault's. Now, early in Vineland, we have Zoyd, the aging doper who remains uncorrupted in his refusal to collaborate or inform, but who made his peace with the Feds by agreeing to the ineffectual role of clownish eccentricity. These contrasting projections (of the artist, not the person), might mark an increasing marginalization of the creative subject; his feeling of ease proving to be little more than the freedom that comes when one has ceased to resist any more.

This is why Vineland should disappoint more than the scholars: for all Pynchon's evident warmth and generational identity, and for all the new realism, the America he returns to in the book remains a land of simulation—better observed and more fully experienced, surely, than in Jean Baudrillard's America, but no more engaging for that. Maybe that is not Pynchon's fault, but what we need, and what has been oddly lacking in recent fiction and theory, is a style of resistance to the forms of unreality in America that Vineland documents. For the moment, the best we can do is to continue to work through the refractoriness and literary complexity of Gravity's Rainbow, and hope that Vineland turns out to be only an outrider for a harder, more resilient fiction.