Vineland

The inspiration for One Battle After Another

Thomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dream

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.

Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.

'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie

Review: A major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years...One of America's great writers has, after long wanderings down his uncharted roads, come triumphantly home -- Salman Rushdie * New York Times Book Review *
Vintage stuff - funny, fantastically inventive, packed with improbable erudition * Times Literary Supplement *
A essential novel of our fin de siecle, a finger pointing the way out of the 1980s * USA Today *
His descriptive powers are breathtaking...Pynchon proves once again to be the master of what might be called the highbrow conspiracy thriller * Wall Street Journal *
One of the funniest, most cleverly written, superbly characterised and beautifully structured books that I have read by a living author Time Out