Vineland Reread

by Peter Coviello

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow , it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland , Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vineland Reread by Peter Coviello is both a critical work on Vineland as well as an argument for rereading books in general. Yet it also does so many other things as well.

I'm not sure that this will appeal to anyone who hasn't read Vineland, though I think that it might still work if the reader is more interested in how the various readings work as compared to the readings as critiques of the book. That probably makes no sense, so let me try to explain what I mean.

The readings of Vineland that Coviello uses are from very different and specific periods, both of his life and of the world at large. What he brings to each reading and the world he is inhabiting at the time shape what aspects of the novel speak to him the most. In that way each reading is largely a separate critique coming from a different perspective. Without having read Vineland the critiques may still mean something to the reader of this book (due in large part to how well Coviello sets everything up) but just as likely not. What each reading can do, whether one has read Vineland or not, is illustrate the different ways into any novel. I think this applies equally to someone rereading the same novel at different times or several different people finding different paths into the same novel. In other words, even without prior knowledge of Vineland I think a reader can gain a lot about how we read any book based on where we are in life and what is happening around us.

Yeah, I'm not sure my explanation really made anything any clearer, sorry. So, for readers of Vineland and Pynchon this work offers several ways to appreciate (maybe not like, that is far too subjective) the book that they may not have considered. I happen to be one of those who enjoyed Vineland, enough to have read it twice before getting Coviello's and again while reading it. I will also admit to being someone who regularly rereads books, so I could easily relate to a lot of what he was talking about.

I highly recommend this to readers of Pynchon and Vineland, whether you cared for the book or not. In fact, if you didn't care for it but also didn't hate it, I think this is an ideal book for you. If you are the kind of reader who can enjoy a critical book about a work you haven't read, and you haven't read Vineland, I think there is enough here to reward a reading, and it may entice you to read Vineland.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Goatboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has bristled at the voices claiming Vineland as only a "minor" work of Pynchon while knowing in your bones there were unrecognized depths going unseen within its smaller cast of characters and scenery...

For anyone who has ever had a friend come back from a movie, or from just having finished a novel, only to regal you with a plethora of enamored reasons why you should experience it immediately...

For anyone who has already read Vineland and wants to be delightedly reminded of scene after scene, paragraph after paragraph, that they might have forgotten but can now relive as though reminiscing with an old friend who shares your deep-seated love of the work...

This book is for you.

Peter Coviello has written a love letter to Pynchon and Vineland, and his enthusiasm is mighty contagious. Managing to highlight both the humor and the political grief, not to mention the prognosticating truth of the world Pynchon clearly saw coming for all of us, Coviello successfully conveys the many many reasons why Vineland is a novel to return to (most especially now, in the year 2021).

I had already been meaning to revisit Vineland.
Now it is a certainty.

[غبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

i continue to helplessly love peter coviello's writing <3

[Egghead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vineland: comedy,
politics, family, death
also a big mess