There is a tendency when reading Pynchon to rifle through the past to find the answers to the questions in the present. Whether the author wants us to follow this path remains to be seen. 1973's "Gravity's Rainbow" enacts a fractured version of this layering of facts and history as a foundation for present-day behavior. As this colorful palette of characters tries to survive, they often shield themselves from the past - perhaps as a device for being fully aware and committed to sifting through the chaotic lives and associations around them. 1990's "Vineland" revels in the past. First, as a distinct reflection of Eighties Reagan-era America longing for the proverbial "good ol' days." Second, they are losing their memories to drugs, generational shifts, and technological failures. As the characters in this blissful Northern California community weather the storms of life, we find solace in Pynchon's most vivid and poignant familial portrait.
Pynchon's original portrait of Zoyd Wheeler was one of fatherly overtones. We sense that he cares about his daughter Prairie, and the pair have a deep connection even as she hits adolescence (showing her mother's rebellious streak,) and Zoyd leaps out of a window to keep the benefits coming. As Zoyd's old world collides with this new one, it is Prairie who seems to be more clear-eyed about life outside of their home. Even as her growing social circle threatens to cloud her judgment, Zoyd's honesty is there for her to poke holes in. As in Pynchon's 1966 classic "The Crying of Lot 49," a female hero - so to speak - is an opportunity to lead us on a quest.
In saying goodbye to Prairie, Zoyd's vivid trip down memory lane illustrates what was desperately wrong with hippie childhood (LSD in the formula!) and right (a communal lifestyle as a continuation of the African proverb "it takes a village.") Nonetheless, Zoyd's so-called "traveling" into his former wife Frenesi's modern life riles Prairie's cynicism and a created a disconnect signaling a need to find her own answers. It is not that Zoyd is some manner of "unreliable narrator." It is more that he may have never given up on their past, which for Prairie provides no path to her future (her succinct and heartbreaking "I love you Dad, but it's incomplete.")
If Zoyd really possessed the vision to see Frenesi's modern life, he would be less than amused. Her internal monologue is her self-preservation in a world of "braying circular saws" and Southplex shopping mall Hell. Once a fiercely in-demand documentary filmmaker, this new lifestyle among houseplants and Formica is made to feel foreign almost staged. Still, she speaks the native tongue of this slice of generic suburbia so well, that you think that she would welcome the mystery of a visit from the past. With Flash (Fletcher,) who Pynchon expertly implies is one in a series of renegade lovers, Frenesi beautifully recalls the past of her parents (especially her fiery mother Sasha) where she revels almost as long and lovingly as her former husband. Then like Zoyd defenestrating a window, a computer glitch awakens her survival instincts. As Frenesi drives around the mysterious Zone 7, and Prairie hits the road with Billy Barf and The Vomitones, we realize that this road has awakened their instincts and similarities thus leading them together.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
