Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

12:37Jeff O'Neal:I look forward to receiving this first edition you're going to send me for Christmas.

12:41Rebecca Schinsky:I'm trying to find the least. There's not that many inexpensive ones. It looks like even on thrift books right now, there aren't too many used copies to be had. So you can find a good condition of the first paperback for$38. So you could go find yourself, or you can find a new one there. or, you know, set an alert, add to your wish list. And when one of these other copies crops up, you can see. Thrift Books also tells you about how many of these editions they get. So there's this one edition. It's a February 91 Penguin edition of Vineland. Vineland. I don't want to say Vineland because there's a little town in Kansas next to where I grew up called Vineland.

13:23Rebecca Schinsky:So I keep wanting to say Vineland. It says about how many they receive per month. So this one, they receive about six copies per month. So you have some sense, like, is this an impossible situation? or I can go with this sometime. So anyway.

13:33Jeff O'Neal:I ordered my new copy of Vineland from Thrift Books.

13:36Rebecca Schinsky:Very nice.

13:37Jeff O'Neal:And I got a little discount on it, free shipping. It was great.

13:39Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, free shipping. It's$19.20. So if you live in the US, you'll get free shipping from Thrift Books right now. And you get towards the Reader's Reward Program. They got plenty in stock. They say 50 available. I think that might just mean they've got 50 and a bunch more. So thanks to them for sponsoring the show. But what's this thing about, Rebecca?

13:56Jeff O'Neal:Okay, so it's written in 1990. It's an alternate history that takes place in 1984. in Thomas Pynchon's invented town of Vineland, California. And residents are hanging on to the last shreds of 1960s hippie culture because Reaganite politics and social conservatism are sweeping the country. The government is striding toward a police state. There's widespread surveillance, prosecution of radical objectors. There is a war on drugs that is serving as cover for all manner of civil rights violations. Stop me any time any of this starts sounding familiar.

14:30Rebecca Schinsky:Kind of weird, right?

14:32Jeff O'Neal:And the citizens are numbed out on the tube, which is what they call the TV. Our main character, Zoid Wheeler, and his teenage daughter Prairie are setting out to find Prairie's mother, Frenessi. She was a 60s radical who sold out and ran off with a Fed. And along the way, there are maybe aliens. There are definitely ninjas. There are government informers. There are shadowy forces galore. there is one landscaping company called the Marquis de Sade, S-O-D. And for that alone, Thomas Pynchon should have won awards for this book. And Paul Thomas Anderson isn't the only reason that the book is drawing attention right now.

15:11Jeff O'Neal:I think the current political moment, as I was alluding to in what the book is about, has caused a mini resurgence in book coverage that's referring to Vineland and trying to refract current events through previous iterations of radical conservatism that have showed up in fiction.

15:30Rebecca Schinsky:And yet, so the plot here is really, let's go find this woman. There's Hector, who is a former DEA agent who's been, he's basically like addicted to TV. It's referred to as a tube. He's a tuber here.

15:49Jeff O'Neal:He has to go to the tubal detox center.

15:51Rebecca Schinsky:He's actually escaped from it. It seems like everyone here has escaped from some other institution. Everyone should be locked up somewhere. Or the day that we meet Zoid,

15:59Jeff O'Neal:we know Zoid is like running free and living on like social welfare, basically, that he maintains by once a year, going to do his annual transfenestration, which is jumping through a window, not out of it. And he has to do this on TV, so that it's well documented that he has what mental incapacity, I believe is what they call it. And then as long as he demonstrates in public once a year that he seems a little crazy. He will continue to get his checks and the feds will leave him alone until they decide not to leave him alone anymore.

16:29Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, that opening set piece is actually kind of amazing. That first year where we meet Zoid, we get a sense of what's going on because he wants to mix it up. So he goes to buy a dress. It's kind of, you know, there's kind of a reference to MASH, right? This idea or Catch-22, like this idea of being nervous in the service, being crazy so that you can get out of service in this case so he can continue to get, It sounds like a disability check of some kind, but he wants to mix it up. You know, he wants to go take a chainsaw to a local bar, but there's not enough media there. Everyone's expecting him.

17:00Rebecca Schinsky:Like, that's part of it. Like, everyone's expecting this to happen.

17:02Jeff O'Neal:Every year, Zoid's going to jump through a window and they're all going to show up and watch him.

17:06Rebecca Schinsky:And yet it still qualifies. Like, it's an inverse of Catch-22 in which he's acting rationally, right? To perform insanity in this moment is rational for him to sort of stay on the government dole. The thing that's motivating a lot of the actors, because there's sort of a detente that exists in the background of this, is of a post-60s agreement between various parties. The DEA, the military, leftist radicals, everyone that, okay, the 60s, we came out of that, but you're going to stay over here, you're going to stay over here, and we're going to fund everyone and everything's going to be fine. And then the Reagan administration comes in and they start cutting checks.

17:47Rebecca Schinsky:So there's no funding for the DEA. There's less funding for the institution, for Zoid to get his. There's less funding for the Witness Protection Program, which Frenessi and her paramour Flash and their son John are enjoying. So as that money dries up, it's kind of like the opposite of the worms coming out after a storm. As that money dries up, people start coming to the surface because they're no longer subsidized to say subaltern in a lot of different ways. And that is where they start coming together and trying to figure out what their relationships are to each other, what they could be going forward.

18:24Rebecca Schinsky:I think from there, I'll say this, that the plot is, I don't know what your experience of this, but the plot is more of a coat rack to hang things on than the thing you're supposed to be following the most.

18:39Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it feels, I was listening to you describe it and even hearing myself describe what happens in this book really doesn't convey what it feels like to read it. It's like, oh, that's cute. It's about people coming together to figure out their relationships. but it feels to me like jazz in a lot of ways that riffs on itself that wanders away and then comes back to a main theme like manic jazz jazz on cocaine and acid at the same time kind of free

19:09Rebecca Schinsky:i mean kind of ornette coleman free jazz i mean maybe i think one of the frustrations and delights for me and i'll say i have a and maybe this is a feature not a bug is there are some moments and i have an extraordinary long list of my favorite bits here and I cannot get to all of them. But I did that both for you and for me. There are moments that are just absolutely wonderful in this book. And I kept finding, can we just do, can we get more of the hits, play more of these hits? But I have to remind myself that that's part of the structure is to wander away, come back, alienate the reader, engender a feeling of strangeness of what's going on because the one of the thing post-modernism does, and this is inherited from modernism, is try to make you feel the feeling they're writing about rather than just writing about the feeling like, you know, in psychological, rather than just say character X was feeling estranged and alienated from the world.

20:05Rebecca Schinsky:Part of it is, can I, through the power of art and the incantation of QWERTY UEOP, get the reader to feel this thing I want to try to engage with?

20:15Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it feels very noisy.

20:17Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

20:17Jeff O'Neal:And that you're in a moment where a thing happens and we know who we're with and what they're doing and what they're about. And then one of those characters is riffing on something and we're gone for like pages at a time into weird stories that really do sound like that friend who is on drugs, who is rambling forever and then has a moment of coherence. And if you zone out during the rambling, you're also going to miss the moments of coherence.

20:45Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

20:46Jeff O'Neal:Like that was both the most frustrating and the most rewarding part of this reading experience was when you can stay tuned in and hang out for the ride that Pension is taking you on in the middle of a paragraph out of nowhere, something profound happens. But if you're just there's you can't just scan the page hoping to see like the next moment. It's not like scanning through the descriptions of whaling in Moby Dick. There's not there's not an easy cue. who Pynchon is forcing, if you're going to know what's going on here, you're going to be forced to stay in with the text and in with the characters.

21:22Jeff O'Neal:And then inside that feeling that he, I think is very successful at creating of confusion and worked up and head spinning. There's a lot of noise.

21:32Rebecca Schinsky:They are not similar writers by any sense of imagination, but for many readers, and I'll throw myself into the, I'll throw myself into this ring with my hat on, is there's an element to reading Pynchon that's for me like reading Shakespeare, beer, which is you can let your eyes slip over sections. You know, this happened to me. I'm not going to lie. In the reading of this, I just sort of like didn't get it. I zoned out. I looked for the next dialogue break to sort of give myself a break. But that is, I think, okay is not the word I'm looking for. That is normal. And this is not the kind of book where you should expect yourself to get almost the majority of it on first glance at a normal sort of reading pace.

22:14Rebecca Schinsky:If you have trouble focusing on any kind of reading, this will be extraordinary tough slating for you. And I don't want to sugarcoat that. There are rewards to be had there. But if you try Pinchin, any more difficult stuff, I would give yourself the grace to be like, I just kind of zoned out for two paragraphs there. Do I need to go back? keep going take what you can and if you want to go back that's great but these things are not meant to be single serving you know that's not the only way to engage with them as a single

22:47Jeff O'Neal:serving reading experience i totally agree i've been thinking a lot about this and how we talk about books and reading as if you're supposed to be able to read the book and then have gleaned everything from it in one reading like yes i've read it check it off the list done on to the next thing but when people talk about art that's antithetical to the way that we learn about how to see a work of art, how to see a painting. Teachers talk about like sit in front of it and look at the painting for 10 minutes. The New York Times has even been running pieces about this. Like, let's all look at this piece of art together for 10 minutes and see what we notice or stand in front of a sculpture and note five things that stand out to you and then change your angle and make five more observations and that you could do this on and on repeatedly, like day after day or year after year.

23:31Jeff O'Neal:Certainly rereading is a reward for most types of books, but I can see how it would really, you're going to get more out of Pynchon with each successive read because there just is so much language and there is so much detail that you don't need every last detail. You don't need every last word, I don't think. I don't think Pynchon even expects you to come away having processed 100 % of the words on the page. But if you did want to go back, And honestly, I probably won't. But like, if you did want to go back, it would become richer over time.

24:04Rebecca Schinsky:And another strategy might be, if you do summon the temerity to tackle something like this, is when you do encounter a passage, a moment, a scene that speaks to you, that you have a moment of clarity with, rather than linger on it, reread it a couple times, slow down, use that speed bump to smell the roses at that particular moment, and then the other ones that don't come back. I want to come back a little bit to this, what it feels like to read it, because all these things are tangled. I want to do a little bit of this, or why it's important section that we have here. I am not of the opinion that you need to check off or get stamps on your great writers of all time.

24:49Rebecca Schinsky:You know, that's not how I think about these things. I will say the genius of Pynchon, it's a unique reading experience. I think if you're someone that's read, say, David Foster Wallace and haven't read Pinchin, you will find it very interesting because, for example, Thanatoid, which is the zombie-like half-dead people that appear here, appears in The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, right? So they're very much speaking to each other. I don't know my Foster well in terms of his biographies as well as I could. I can only imagine that he had a dog-eared copy of V or the crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow in his rucksack somewhere.

25:27Rebecca Schinsky:I think, and this is not my area of expertise, if you were to ask who the greatest literary postmodernist is, most people would say Pynchon. This post-war, this book is 1990, but really he emerges in 1963 with V and then Gravity's Rainbow, which is sort of his Moby Dick. It won the National Book Award in 1974. It was the book he wrote previous to this. It took him 16 years to get from Gravity's Rainbow to Vineland. Those couple works are what made him the master. And so what is post-modernism? It is a slippery thing to talk about. In the word you can see, it's post-modernism. So it is after the Hemingways, the Wolves, the Ezra Pounds, the Gene Toomers, who were responding to a breakdown of tradition that was catalyzed by World War II, a loss of faith in the church, of institution, monarchies, patriarchy, you know, sort of regular business operations as normal, came to a head.

26:33Rebecca Schinsky:And in all the arts, there was a response. And they have some of their, you know, alienation, estrangement, fragmentations of points of view. I think the thing that's easiest for me to get my head around is that post-modernism is responding to modernism and also extending on it. It's not not modernism. It's sort of modernism plus. It's not anti-modernism. So it extends upon that. But there's a spiritual difference that I detect and some people have written about where modernism saw the end of that crumbling of the thing, right, that they were responding to as mournful, right? There's sort of a sadness in Gatsby, a sadness in A Farewell to Arms, a sadness in Virginia Woolf, a sadness in, you know, The Empty Cup by James Joyce, a sadness in some of these works that that thing is gone.

27:23Rebecca Schinsky:So I have here, whereas modernism mourned, postmodernism dances. to that response.

27:29Jeff O'Neal:There is like a kind of gleeful anarchy to the text.

27:32Rebecca Schinsky:Look, you know, kind of a jester-like, you know, prancing through the remains. They're not the Dauphin who sees the kingdom falling down. It is the jester that is left. And that means that a lot of, it opens up so many possibilities. So a lot, so here's just some characteristics, and it's not definitive, and not every work does any or all of these, but the integration of other art forms, references to other sources and genres that aren't typical of that art form, in this case literature. So in this one, you see there's a lot of TV and movie, right? So much TV and movie. Blending of high and low, like you're going to get the body, you're going to get the risque, and then you're going to get these elevated pieces at the same time.

28:17Rebecca Schinsky:Popular culture advertising, the trappings of sort of post-World War II branding exercises, these giant capitalist brands and international branding is interesting. Engagement with mass media formats. It's hard to remember now that, you know, when Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot are sitting down to scribble some poems, like we barely have movies. We have the printed word radio and barely have movies. So internet and TV especially, and then the multiplex and movies, this idea of these giant blaring horns of consumer culture didn't exist for moderns. And it's really important in this book here.

28:55Jeff O'Neal:And like cable is becoming what cable TV was in the late 80s and early 90s as Pynchett is writing this.

29:02Rebecca Schinsky:You will also see that these books, postmodern works often do not care about linearity. They don't care about coherence. You know, they're interested in coherence and how to talk about incoherence coherently is always one of the things that's at play here. Um, I don't use alternate history for this kind of postmodernism because it's sort of like slightly more slightly askew. This is not say Philip Roth's what if Charles Lindbergh became president. It's not quite that hardcore. It's a it's like, it's more of if you sort of turned your head real quick, it was a slightly different version. That's often the case here.

29:40Rebecca Schinsky:I was thinking about this in terms of mirrors, right? Realistic fiction was trying to hold a mirror up to nature, right? You're trying to like, that was really important. Modernism, like what do we do with this cracked mirror? There are these fissures running through it. We're seeing these weird versions of ourselves. How do we do that? I think of postmodernism, funhouse mirror, where they're like, you know what? It was always just a mirror. It wasn't actually the genuine article. So look at these weird ass things we can do with this mirror in different shapes or form. So that's my two-minute mini lecture on what to expect from postmodernism.

30:10Rebecca Schinsky:Rebecca, does that need a vibe with what you understand or even your reading experience here?

30:14Jeff O'Neal:I really like this mirror metaphor that you reached for here. And I think Funhouse Mirror is right for this because things feel real but distorted. It felt to me like I would believe that characters like Zoid Wheeler exist in a weird little town in Northern California, going to bars with funny names, having strange drinks, tripping on their drugs on the weekends, telling stories about the good old days when everybody was radical. These kinds of people did and do exist, but that Pynchon runs them through his particular filter in order to play with it. Some of it is just for fun. Some of it is just for fun, yes.

30:55Jeff O'Neal:That is clear on the page. That Pynchon was just having a good time. And that image that you evoked earlier of a jester sort of like prancing through whatever a jester is prancing through.

31:08Rebecca Schinsky:The ruined castle. I mean, I do think of it in some way that way.

31:11Jeff O'Neal:I think that really works here. Like he's gleeful about the fun you can have while the world is burning down. And there's a really different flavor to that than, you know, like, I don't know, the common flavor on social media right now. or what I imagine mass media coverage looked like in the late 80s and early 90s about what was happening in Reaganite politics. So like that, there's a like, there's an escape valve a little bit, like it lets out some tension that you can have fun with it. It feels possible to have fun with it on the page in a way that probably didn't feel available in real life, like doesn't feel available, this kind of glee, like glee in the anarchy does not feel available to me in today's real life political moment, but that an artist can do that and, and have this distortion, I think, intentional distortion that is supposed to reflect something very real back to us is really fun and strange and unsettling.

32:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah.

32:13Rebecca Schinsky:Strangeness, I think is if you were to if you were to pick one word, If you're limited to one, strange is not the worst way to go.

32:21Jeff O'Neal:I think if you gave this to someone who's like a casual reader, which that would be a very mean thing to do. But if you did that, you would get like a, what the hell did I just read?

32:30Rebecca Schinsky:What the hell did I just read? Yeah. And I think, I mean, that makes the mystique of Pynchon even more interesting, right? Someone who himself has like chosen to not, like a vampire, he doesn't show up in mirrors. Like he's intentionally, you know, he doesn't want to be represented. weirdly. He's like, can I opt out of this? What do we know about him? An extremely precocious kid. Graduated high school at age 16. He was writing short stories in high school. And some of the similar issues, drug use, paranoia. If Pynchon enjoys one thing, it's naming shit.

33:06Jeff O'Neal:Oh my God. The names of things and places in this book are so delightful.

33:11Rebecca Schinsky:It's so fun. A Lewis Carroll-like delight. Yes, that's a great comparison. Having fun with what things are called. He studied engineering at Cornell and served in the Navy. Was a voracious reader from a young age. Went to go work for Boeing after he was out of the service. And he started writing V while in the service. And then Gravity's Rainbow, which is, again, if it's about anything, putative subject, let's put it this way, is V2, the rockets, Gravity's Rainbow being the parabolic arc of the buzz bombs coming into London from Germany. He's got a math mind, and there is a certain chaotic precision to what he does.

33:53Rebecca Schinsky:That's kind of hard to fathom. I'll say this. I think the term genius is thrown around lightly. He is operating on, like, if 4D chess exists, he is playing it, and then watching us watch him play it.

34:08Jeff O'Neal:That he lands the plane at the end of this book is astonishing. And honestly, like faith that this writer would be able to do that was the thing that got me through a lot of my eyes really want to glaze over right here.

34:24Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, yeah. And again, just embrace that. I mean, I would encourage, I'm going to keep saying that to people. And I think Rebecca's as good a reader as you're going to find. And she and I have this. That's chaos. classes. I talked to Boris Kochka for a thing I did for first edition a little while ago, and he did a kind of a looking for Thomas Pynchon piece, I think when it against the day came out in 2006. And I sort of asked him, he's like, well, you know, as far as I can tell, he sort of lives up on the Upper West Side and goes and eats at Zaybars. And I'm like, you know what? I love that for him.

34:55Rebecca Schinsky:Amazing. Amazing. So I think, you know v itself is is fascinating there are these two it's in search of this being character entity known as v that has different manifestations over time and then there's two main narratives that go towards each other to form a sort of narrative v like that's what we're doing here rebecca like that's just and then there's all stuff in between that immediately hailed as what the hell? Like in the O'Dam Factor of 1963 when V came out. Off the charts. Off the charts. Like what is it? It felt like a missive from a different planet. I wrote here, V is not a book that heralds much of anything but itself is my line, which I kind of like.

35:40Rebecca Schinsky:It's a good line. It's about writing. It's about what Pynchon can do and is interested in.

35:44Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I was proud of you when I read that in the notes this morning. That's a really good line. And I think that is also, it speaks to who will like and who might not like this kind of reading experience. Like, you got to be down for a book that is mostly concerned with itself.

35:59Rebecca Schinsky:And with the experience it's trying to give you. I hope I didn't steal that. It's possible I cribbed that from someone, but I don't think I did. But if zero to well read at bookride.com, if you know where it came from. So that's kind of it. Like, he's been writing steadily. You know, he's written several books, like apparently he's writing several things at the same time. But he's written, he wrote some other things as autobiography, like a little introduction. There's just not much, Rebecca. I'm just trying to say there's just, we don't have access to, which I find frankly, kind of freeing. I am really enjoying that I don't have a pension interview in the Paris Review Art of Fiction number 281 to like go match up the answer key with the text with.

36:39Rebecca Schinsky:I kind of like this.

36:40Jeff O'Neal:It fits for what the book is.

36:42Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

36:42Jeff O'Neal:It like, It just really does. And whether it's a bit or he genuinely wants to stay out of the public eye or maybe both, that's kind of the ideal situation. It works for the kind of writing that he does.

36:54Rebecca Schinsky:It just adds a layer of intrigue and possibility and curiosity that I think is pretty remarkable. We've talked a little bit about the reading experience. This is your Frost Exposure. I have not read All Pension. I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49, V, and This. I think that's all what's it like to read this Rebecca we've talked about what else do we want to say

37:18Jeff O'Neal:it's noisy and chaotic and I came into it with

37:24Rebecca Schinsky:yeah what were you expecting we didn't talk about this you know I

37:28Jeff O'Neal:think I had some like lit bro expectations some of them were fulfilled but I think that what I've actually realized is that the like kinds of dudes that I was exposed to in my 20s who loved Pynchon. You can talk about Pynchon as if you know what he's doing. And he's so complex that you probably genuinely believe. I think these guys genuinely believed that they knew what Pynchon was doing. And having read it now, like the way that they talked about it put me off of any interest to go find out what those books were about. Like, if that was the club, I did not want to be a member. But I now sincerely suspect that a lot of them had no idea what the hell was happening.

38:14Jeff O'Neal:And it was impossible to tell that they didn't know what the hell was happening, because it's hard to know what's happening on the page of this book. But yeah, it was it was chaotic. There were a lot of times that my eyes would glaze over and then I would realize we were back in action scenes. It's like, shit, I got to turn the I got to you got to go back a couple pages, figure out where the action actually like where the jazz riffing turned into action. and who we're talking to and what's about to happen now. And there are like elements from a bunch of other genres that was like, that's exciting and energizing.

38:46Jeff O'Neal:We're like, oh, there's ninjas now and these planes are hooking up to each other or is it aliens? Like I have a note on one page.

38:54Rebecca Schinsky:That's a tough scene to figure out. I'm still not sure what's going on.

38:57Jeff O'Neal:I have a note that's like aliens or just air pirates. And like that air pirates is a thing that seems more reasonable. That's like the reasonable option of the two is also indicative of what it's like to read this. I think it's best broken up into chunks. Like the chapters are not consistent lengths. There are some chapters that are five pages. There's other chapters that are 60 pages. And the longer chapters were, they were more work, to be honest. And I was reading under the gun for my job. But I think if I had if I had it to do over again, I would probably break the 300 pages of this book up over like 30 pages for 10 days or.

39:43Rebecca Schinsky:And do like 20 minutes at a time. Yeah. Six or seven pages and try to linger and slow. And it will take you like I think it was about my reading pace was like half of what my usual reading pace is.

39:55Jeff O'Neal:It took me and that was I just didn't know going.

39:58Rebecca Schinsky:And I should have gotten slower or I could have slower.

40:00Jeff O'Neal:I thought, OK, it's about 400 pages. I probably need like seven or eight hours for this. It took about twice that long. There's just so much language.

40:09Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. His interest, it's hard to pin Pynchon down and that's part of postmodern literature as well. But he himself would not be interested in someone making a cult of Pynchon, which I want to think is one of the ironies of being a Pynchon bro, right? Because even like we have a character here, Weed Altwin, who becomes an accidental shambling figure of something. it's hard not to see Pynchon writing himself a little bit, like sort of stumbles into being representative of something he himself doesn't quite understand.

40:37Jeff O'Neal:Also the character's first name is Weed when like marijuana plays a huge role.

40:43Rebecca Schinsky:Huge role. I'm very interested in groups and subgroups. There's like motorcycle gangs and nunneries and secret artistic cabals and the lady ninjets. Like there's all these little pocket universes. And these weird surf bands. Yeah, bands and collectives, communes of all kinds he finds to be quite interesting. And then Vineland itself becomes a sort of decantment of hippie exiles and burnouts and those under the gun. He also, Brock Vond, who is the putative antagonist here, even the police state is subject to the police state, is one thing that he's interested in. Even these mechanisms of control and domination are not all powerful.

41:35They are mercurial.

41:37Rebecca Schinsky:They get orders rescinded at a critical moment. Actually, maybe the denouement of the whole book, which we haven't talked about. Basically, the administration changes its mind and things sort of turn around and the helos go the opposite direction. the vicissitudes of even the authoritarian state is an interesting counterbalance to something as

41:58Jeff O'Neal:all-encompassing as say big brother in 1984 yeah and it feels to me that felt a lot closer to being true to life for the moment for the moment we're in right now where you're like these are the fools that think they're gonna take everything over like look at them they can't get their story straight they can't keep they can't make a plan and when they've made a half-assed plan they can't keep it and that like there are reasons to be afraid and Pynchon has characters here who have real reasons to be afraid as well but that when you look really closely these guys are jackasses

42:32Rebecca Schinsky:right and the winds may change and they don't even know what reasons they're operating in and they don't know if they know what doing is right and it may change tomorrow so there is a instability to the whole thing because one of the things about like a real dystopian right like you know handmaid's tale or the hunger games it feels like the oppressive regime or even star wars right to the empire it feels like bedrock yes the institution is solid and it has always been solid and so the rebellion or whatever has to go big up the big blue monolithic or the big gray monolithic thing or go to the fortress or do the thing or like oh here it's just kind of what you know go into the woods smoke weed and wait them out there's an element of that right like you know that's like these people they're not as good as that as you

43:21Jeff O'Neal:think and they're kind of amazing finance a reprint of vineland to just put that blurb on

43:26Rebecca Schinsky:the front and make a million dollars smoke weed well tune in turn on and drop out i mean the 60s

43:32Jeff O'Neal:thing is is there's been worse advice for getting through 2025 also yeah um so i think i wrote here

43:40Rebecca Schinsky:there it's a study in contradictions in contrast it can be alternately extremely dense and then very light. It can be very funny and clear and you have character moments where you really feel like there's a connection happening and then being very abstruse. It can be quite bawdy, you know, we talk about gender and, you know, actually pretty good on gender on the whole. That's one thing I hadn't, you know, it feels more modern in that way. But, you know, we're cocks and hard-ons and having sex and all that kind of stuff. None of it is erotic. It's just like the body is part

44:09Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, there's nothing erotic about this novel.

44:14Rebecca Schinsky:I was trying to think of some way to metaphorize or use some other artistic example to sort of give some sense of people how it is. And I kept thinking of Pink Floyd's phrase, the wall of sound. Actually, I think that's maybe Pink Floyd's, one of their production managers. I don't know. Maybe it's not even Pink Floyd, but this wall of sound idea. like there's just there's just so much in his world Pynchon's worlds are overwhelming in their detail and their vision and their comprehensiveness like he will describe to you not just that there's a pair of like interesting buddy tow truck drivers who have their own backstory but then the characters they meet in understanding their backstories have their own backstories yeah everybody's got a backstory like in a way you feel like Pynchon has such a sense of the whole world that he's just telling you a part of what exists there.

45:07Jeff O'Neal:And as a reader, then you don't know which of those backstories are important until later in the book, like, everybody in a scene gets a backstory. And a couple of those characters might show up later. And you need to, it helps you if you remember who they were. But in the moment, it's like, why am I learning this about this guy's sister?

45:27Rebecca Schinsky:Some of it, I think, because he can, he wants to, it's like, I've got an idea or a little move or sometimes they'll set you up just for a pun. Just like a long thing will be set up for your joke.

45:36Jeff O'Neal:About like to go back to art a little bit, it made me think about Jackson Pollock and that image of like just standing over a canvas splattering paint and it looks chaotic, but there's an intention and kind of an order to it. And so much of it is the guy who's making the thing being able to look at it and be like, just a little more there. That'll be fun. And just a little more over here. That'll be good. And that it is controlled. He's in control of it, even if we don't feel like we have control of our own experience of it. And that element of postmodernism, I think really works here. So much of the book is about media and about mediated lives.

46:13Jeff O'Neal:And there's even a quote at one, somebody says at one point, if mediated lives, why not mediated deaths? How we see ourselves in our world through the lens of all the media that we encounter. And someone even says about the only thing that'll get a fascist through is his charm. The news folks love it boy does that seem good lord just at our decade next time yeah and that our politics are mediated through the media and managed by it and shaped by it the i was thinking about this as

46:45Rebecca Schinsky:looking at a piece of art like a big i wasn't thinking about pollock necessarily that one makes sense to me too because there's a sense both in looking at jackson pollock and in reading pinch and in my experience at least of both that if you stand far back you get the whole thing but then you sort of miss the details and if you're real close you get the details and not the whole thing so it feels like you're always sort of looking at it the wrong way uh-huh right

47:06Jeff O'Neal:like there's a way of being like well that's just messy yeah that misses the point there isn't a

47:12Rebecca Schinsky:right way to to like you have to sort of think of them in both um phrases um one thing that struck me here is that there is almost like the solidity of the empire to some degree there is a um I don't know how to put a solace a weird solace in thinking that everything is a giant conspiracy yeah right because at least someone's in control like and we could then take the narrative back it's a bad narrative we can take it back oh but pension is sort of suggesting this was I think this is a modern sensibility to some people too that it's either it's either that or just a goddamn mess there isn't some one true storyline we should be on that we can get back to people would rather have like a religion have some the illuminati be in control than know it's just us bozos here you know sort of messing it up as we go coming fresh off of a

48:04Jeff O'Neal:dan brown read if you want to hear us talk about dan brown's latest that's in the book riot podcast feed and his whole career and the reason that he is so popular is that those kinds of stories about like look at the shadowy forces that actually control everything and you've never heard of it and now you're in on it. People love that. Our brains are really drawn to this sense that there is a narrative. There is somebody in control. There is a story that if we just tapped into it, and I think Pynchon is playing into usually the reaction to the suggestion that there's not something in control. It's like, that's just terrifying.

48:38Jeff O'Neal:If there's nothing, he's like, it's terrifying. Or maybe it's liberating. Maybe we should just have a party. Maybe we should just go out into the woods and smoke some weed and wait them out.

48:48Rebecca Schinsky:You know, I think it's, I think one of the easier things to see, because some of the characters talk about this directly, is like, what the hell happened to the 60s? Right? This is in 1990. So he's been writing it through the 80s. I can only imagine. We don't know. But it's clearly thinking about how do we get to Reagan from the Summer of Love, from Woodstock? And this is, I think, a character says, how do we go from drugs being the answer to this is your brain on drugs?

49:13Jeff O'Neal:Right.

49:13Rebecca Schinsky:There's some interesting theories, Winky. I'll save that for some of my quotes. I think California is interesting to think about here as a microcosm of America. It goes from the sort of pristine wilderness. Again, there are people living there, but, you know, seen as being in harmony with nature to the place that they shot the speeder bike scene in Return of the Jedi. Like that is, that is like till the George Lucas folks showed up in Marin County, like the direct imposition of media, money, and modernity. Ooh, that's the 3M, which is also a giant international conglomerate. Like, that's not the worst thing to do.

49:48Rebecca Schinsky:So I think of this image of Vineland being this trailer park with a bunch of TVs amongst the Sequoias, right? That's not the worst way to get a sense of what's going on here. The idea that everyone sort of gets everything as a put on and there's nothing being hidden. So Zoid Wheeler's ritualized expected performance of stage madness to secure disability payments. It's all a put on, right? Everyone is in on the joke that's not a joke. That is the real thing.

50:19Jeff O'Neal:And he and the feds agree to this. Like this is just what you got. Like once a year, you just have to show up and do it. Everybody knows that it's a mess. Everybody knows that it's a performance. Yeah.

50:29Rebecca Schinsky:Okay. This is pretty simple. Is it for you? It's for you. if what, Rebecca? Did I write this? Did you? If I didn't write this, I might have written this.

50:38Jeff O'Neal:It's for you if you like a challenge, and it's for you if you are willing to hang through the noise for the moments of clarity. On the flip, maybe not for you if reading that feels like work is going to turn you off.

50:51Rebecca Schinsky:Can we trouble work that feels like effort? Because work, I don't know. Sure. You wrote that sentence. Okay, good. I'm glad. I don't like... Reading is effortful, right because I think some people might hear reading his work as being like breaking rocks I don't think I actually don't think it's quite like that I think it might be more like fishing in which you have to go through a lot for these you know moments of strikes you got to stand out in the river and you're getting bit by mosquitoes you're like what am I doing this yeah there's a patience element yeah yeah um yeah and also if you're looking for linearity

51:27Jeff O'Neal:or if you want a book that you could clearly describe as being either plot-driven or character-driven, it is neither of those things. There are characters and there is plot. And in a lot of ways, they're not the point.

51:41Rebecca Schinsky:Right. Immortal Questions, Art asks, which of these are primary here? I'll go through them real quickly. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's to deal with good and evil? It's about all of them.

51:54Jeff O'Neal:It's about all of them.

51:55Rebecca Schinsky:It really is. I'm not kidding, right?

51:57Jeff O'Neal:To some degree, it's about all of them.

51:58Rebecca Schinsky:If we had to pick two...

52:04Rebecca Schinsky:How do I know what I know? I think it's way up there.

52:07Jeff O'Neal:And I think what's the deal with good and evil is stealthily a central question here.

52:14Rebecca Schinsky:The chaos versus conspiracy. It's like, well, it's Nietzschean beyond good and evil to some degree. But I think it's maybe a little less what else might there be. I mean, in a metaphysical way. Yeah. We get these thanatoids, but even that is like these half zombie people. We get the sense on the other, if they were to complete their journey to wherever they're halfway to, it's just oblivion. There isn't sort of some other realm.

52:36Jeff O'Neal:A little of like what's the good life. Yeah. But largely, how do I know what I know?

52:42Rebecca Schinsky:There's a lot about how to deal with the certainty of death. There's like overt discussions about like, you know, sort of distracting ourselves. And if we had to ever come face to face with it, we'd have a different understanding of it. Are we sure this is about art and writing?

52:53Jeff O'Neal:It's 100 million percent. about art and writing. And it's a political novel and art is always political. So in like a bunch of ways, this book is about being a book.

53:03Rebecca Schinsky:My line here is postmodern postmodernism is always and sometimes primarily about itself.

53:09Jeff O'Neal:Yep.

53:10Rebecca Schinsky:Okay, best and worst. I've got a bunch. Where do you want to go? Let's start with a few of yours.

53:16Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, let's see. Dangerous men with coarsened attitudes, especially towards death were perched around lightly on designer bar stools, sipping kiwi mimosas, like whimsy and the seriousness of life and death altogether. Just a couple sentences. I just liked the sound of Furnessi had written into his life like a whole gang of outlaws. Like I can only aspire to be described in that way. And I will fall far short of it. I'll be lucky if someone ever is like she was a hell of a broad, but to be described as having a whole gang of outlaws.

53:50Rebecca Schinsky:That's pretty good.

53:51Jeff O'Neal:It's pretty good.

53:52Rebecca Schinsky:You're going to make me weaken the knees with one of those. One of the things that Pension, I think, is able to get away with here is sometimes just saying the thing directly in a way that in a more straightforward novel would rub me the wrong way of like, let me come around to these conclusions myself.

54:07Jeff O'Neal:But so much of this is chaotic that when he stops and has a character just actually say the thing, it's like, oh, thank God. And so one of those is men had it so simple when it wasn't about sticking it in. it was about having a gun, a variation that allowed them to stick it in from a distance.

54:23Rebecca Schinsky:It's almost like, it's almost like just like Oscar Wilde could have said something like that. Like, you know, a postmodern Oscar Wilde.

54:31Jeff O'Neal:One word just that like really.

54:33Rebecca Schinsky:Like he loves these little cults and groups and stuff. He's so fascinated by them.

54:38Jeff O'Neal:The cult of like the cult of lady ninjas that have their hideaway in the woods tell somebody we're notorious here for having the worst food in the seminar providing community. And like, I've gone to some meditation retreats and I have experienced the food of the seminar providing community basically in the woods of California. And that's a real thing. So this also makes me like, what experiences was Thomas Pynchon off having?

55:02Rebecca Schinsky:I was thinking about that, too. He must be out there doing stuff because it's so embedded in the world. Yeah.

55:07Jeff O'Neal:And he can go do it because he's not like his face isn't plastered all over everything. He's probably pretty incognito most of the time.

55:14Rebecca Schinsky:um i've got i've kind of grouped these and i'll do a couple examples in each because i could do this for literal hours but he is also um in a different world you can see i'm going to make a shakespeare comparison to then because even on the on the level of just description and word creation he just makes stuff up we have to like stop and think about what he's talking about so this is just one sentence he and hector exchanged the briefest of thumb grips and he's just talking about a handshake yep and i was like i never really thought about that before that a The handshake is just you put your hands next to each other and then wrap your thumb around the other person.

55:49Rebecca Schinsky:And then so the other one is they were talking about kind of the standoff where you have with people where no one's talking and you're waiting for someone to talk. And sort of this silent thing happens that you sort of do between each other. So they were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to talk to Zoid. I'm like, it's just in that little, like there's so much creativity in there. I just find so amazing. And so he can be really compact. And then I'll give one maximalist example. And this is a little bit long. And this is just an aside.

56:21Rebecca Schinsky:This is Isaiah 2, 4, who's named after Revivalverse, who is Prairie's boyfriend, who's the member of this rock band that also moonlights as an Italian wedding band.

56:31Jeff O'Neal:And that is what reading this book feels like. Yeah.

56:34Rebecca Schinsky:So he comes to Zoid with this business idea because he wants him to co-sign. And Zoid's like, no one's going to co-sign alone with me. Now I'm reading. Isaiah's business idea was to set up the first one, eventually a chain of violence centers, each on the scale perhaps of a small theme park, including automatic weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video game rooms for the kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. As part of the concept were a standardized floor plan and logo for franchising purposes. Isaiah sat at the cable spool table making diagrams with tortilla chips and pitching his dreams.

57:08Rebecca Schinsky:Third World Thrills A jungle obstacle course where you got to swing on ropes Fall into the water, blast away at surprise pop-up targets Shaped like indigenous gorilla elements Scum of the city Which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world Images of assorted urban undesirables Including pimps, perverts, dope dealers and muggards All carefully multiracial So as to defend everybody In an environment of dark alleys, lurid neon And piped in saxophone music For the agro connoisseur

57:35Jeff O'Neal:I mean what in the world Rebecca?

57:39Rebecca Schinsky:that's unbelievable there's so much about like that feels so contemporary it's like you could like is it sort of like bass pro shops sponsored by cult 40 like i can see this you could

57:54Jeff O'Neal:like control f a lot of this book and move it into present politics and the rise of trumpism

58:00Rebecca Schinsky:and it would feel absolutely current yeah um there are there you know what's interesting and this is maybe we get into spoiler territory this is not exist this is not camu it's existential because like so many there is a what is the thing worth preserving what what what is it amongst all this stuff uh i'll spoil the very end for you all right now i don't have the line here but the very end prairie she's almost adopted by um by uh brock right yeah um and so he gets he gets his orders change sort of mid descent to sort of come grab her and she sort of wakes up also she starts fantasizing about him because there's a lot of psychosexual stuff with the with military stuff that happens throughout but then she sort of wakes up and she realized over everything was okay when the descendant of her grandma's dog is licking her on the face right so it's like that but there's this moment where zoid is sort of trying to figure out how he's getting through stuff right and his the love of his life for nacy's he says for nacy might be gone but there always be his love for Prairie, burning like a nightlight, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long.

59:06Rebecca Schinsky:So it's there for you waiting. That's like so tender and beautiful. Like you can do all this is unbelievable.

59:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. He's playing in a lot of different channels.

59:15Rebecca Schinsky:Let me just do a couple more things. He, this is a thread. He loves to make up little songs. Oh yes. Just all over. And you know, your mileage may vary. And some of them are like, okay, whatever. But the one that got me was when D.L. Chastain, who's like this lady vigilante, ninja vigilante, gets up to sing just randomly, kind of, I think at a karaoke bar, or maybe did she take the mic from someone? I don't remember, to be honest. And she sings this song that goes, just a floozy with an oozy, just a girly with a gun, when I could have been a model, and I should have been a nun. That's a good tattoo as well.

59:50Jeff O'Neal:It is a good tattoo.

59:52Rebecca Schinsky:Let's see. And it can be funny, too. Like, the prairie going in to teach the nuns and, like, making them food and them having their mind blown. What were you going to serve them? She couldn't help asking. Dip. Chirped a myth. Yeah, there's a great...

1:00:06Jeff O'Neal:I don't think it made my notes, but in that same scene, she learns that you have to use enough of UBI, the universal binding ingredient, which is cream of mushrooms.

1:00:14Rebecca Schinsky:Cream of mushrooms. Like, that was very Midwestern. I'm like, you're from Long Island, Pinch. How do you know our dark secrets of church potlucks? Here's just another one where the pleasure of the line can be so intense. He felt like a basketball after a Lakers game. Alive, resilient, still pressurized with spirit, yet with the distinct memory of having been for a few hours expertly bounced.

1:00:36Jeff O'Neal:Like, what the hell? That's just, you can't do that to me, man. That's a great line. I marked that one. Yeah, I had a lot of that one.

1:00:40Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know what else to do. Can we go on to my, I want to do my hit list.

1:00:45Jeff O'Neal:This is an incomplete list of delightful weirdness. Yes, yes, yes. This is related.

1:00:49Rebecca Schinsky:Very much so.

1:00:50Jeff O'Neal:There's a band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones. Amazing. As I said in the intro, there's a landscaping company called the Marquis de Sade. I have searched the internet. There is one of those companies in this country, and it does not make t-shirts, and I am very sad. Floozy with the Newsy is also great. There's a bar called the Lost Nugget. There's a bar called the Steam Donkey. There's a bar called the Cosmic Pineapple.

1:01:13Rebecca Schinsky:I think he just kind of wants to name bars.

1:01:15Jeff O'Neal:I want a pinch and bar name generator on the internet. Yes. And then my favorite bit in the whole book is a tiny moment where one of the thanatoids, who's, as you said, is like a half dead creature, is having trouble renting a tux. Because obviously a thanatoid needs to rent a tux to go to some event. And is explaining that thanatoids have trouble renting tuxes for all these things they have to go to because their credit situation is so complicated. Because they're not quite dead and they're not quite alive. And that Pynchon had sat down somewhere and imagined that this idea occurred to him at all, that a half-dead thing has to rent a tux and their credit would be messed up.

1:01:53Jeff O'Neal:Just I found to be totally delightful.

1:01:55Rebecca Schinsky:It's amazing. Let's see. Hot takes. You've got the best one here, but you go.

1:02:01Jeff O'Neal:I think the people that are most likely to read and enjoy this book are the ones that are least likely to need to hear Pynchon's argument. You're probably already pretty on board with what he's doing. And then also, the book is not difficult in language or its ideas. It's that Pynchon never lets up. And he doesn't give you -

1:02:19Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, sentence by sentence, it's a great way to put it. Yeah, sentence by sentence.

1:02:21Jeff O'Neal:He doesn't let up. He doesn't give you any cues when something important is about to happen. So it's an exercise in, it's kind of an exercise in like persistent attention paying, but also an exercise in always being willing to pop out of the haze you've been in and back into a piece of action.

1:02:38Rebecca Schinsky:My hot take is a weird one. I went the other way. Pynchon's underrated. Because people feel like the hot take is Pynchon is overrated. Oh, no, I think that's such an established take. Yeah, it's a hot take that people think is hot, but it's actually room temperature. But Pynchon is underrated, as my take. Further recommendations. Yeah, I think it's not a read-alike, but it's a fascinating companion to high dystopian-like Orwell. I have White Noise. I think Delillo's White Noise is a little more digestible, but operating on similar wavelengths for me.

1:03:12Jeff O'Neal:And more overtly about what we do to avoid death and the fear of death. When we read that together, I remember being like, well, I'm terrified that I'm going to die someday. So let's go walk around the grocery store. Yeah, that's a good one. I think The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, or if you want to go like a little more OG Egan to look at me, her novel from 2001 gets into some of this surveillance, like tech, not quite dystopia, but weird speculative stuff. And then in looking around on the internet, I saw a lot of recommendations for Tropic of Orange. I don't know that book. I don't know either.

1:03:43Jeff O'Neal:Karen Tay Yamashita, also set in California. Similar, sounds like a similar kind of vibe. But I'm going to be looking into that one. I also want to recommend that you go read Salman Rushdie's review of this for the New York Times. Because first of all, when this book came out in 1990, they got Salman Rushdie to write the review of it. And it is a work of art in itself.

1:04:05Rebecca Schinsky:I also was just thinking that something like Interior Chinatown or How to Live Safely in a Science. Oh, yeah. That's a great.

1:04:12Jeff O'Neal:Charles Yu is a good recommendation. More accessible.

1:04:16Rebecca Schinsky:It's different, but you're going to see some homologous structures in those works. Three to five takeaways. Pension is funny and can be a lot of fun. I think that Pension is funny is not something people think of. I think often these big totemic works, like Melville's Funny. Moby Dick can be funny. It's like everything. So one of those things is everything.

1:04:39Jeff O'Neal:They acquire this halo of serious literature that really obscures what the author is trying to do.

1:04:47Rebecca Schinsky:Pynchon makes Hunter S. Thompson look like a finger painting toddler. You can take that one out. Almost all of Pynchon, and I've not read all of it, would still feel cutting edge today.

1:04:56Jeff O'Neal:I totally agree with that. Yeah, I think also you could just toss in, like you think this political moment is new. We've been doing this forever, Or at least we've been doing this since the 80s. It feels very...

1:05:05Rebecca Schinsky:Which the one battle after another title becomes quite interesting. Because I was like, is that phrase in the book? I don't think it is.

1:05:12Jeff O'Neal:I didn't come across it.

1:05:13Rebecca Schinsky:We have here... Can you get most of this just from watching the Signal adaptation? There hasn't been one. But we're about to see someone... I don't know if it's going to be the Signal one. But someone's using this to do something on screen. Which is fascinating because I hadn't remembered how much of it is about film.

1:05:27Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. So much of it is about...

1:05:29Rebecca Schinsky:There's a lot of stuff about film.

1:05:30Jeff O'Neal:Movies and documentary making. and yeah, I mean, maybe we'll come back in here and have some thoughts about the film after we've seen it.

1:05:38Rebecca Schinsky:All right, we're running a little long. Our final beat, zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. We have five parameters, historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, and oh damn factor. Historical importance, I'll float a number for each of these. You can tell me what you think, if that makes sense. I'll do a first draft. I think a six because it's not a signal pinching. You go higher.

1:06:00Jeff O'Neal:Oh, I would have gone a little lower it's hard to i think i was sitting in the like four or five range yeah so gravity's rainbow being

1:06:10Rebecca Schinsky:the would be the highest would you give that a eight sure we haven't read it so it's i haven't read it like just but even as mind share it's almost better to ask yes yeah like i had not

1:06:20Jeff O'Neal:heard of the book vineland by thomas that's interesting until this came up with one battle after another readability okay this is a tricky one um four yeah it's not ulysses it's also not the wasteland we're like what the hell is this right yeah i think four four current relevance and central questions i'm tempted to do nine yeah i yeah i would give you can give this a 10 if this If this book came out in 2025, I would believe you.

1:06:52Rebecca Schinsky:Book nerd read cred. I think there's a difference here. Pynchon, I think, is a nine himself, if you've read a Pynchon. This one, I think, within that is... Is it one of the big three? Yeah, I think a six. But maybe an eight just for having one Pynchon under your belt, right? Just having one. Let's split the difference and call it a seven. Seven. Oh, damn factor. Boy, that's a hard one, too. It's so high to me.

1:07:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. Yeah. There's just a lot. And I feel like if I reread it, my oh damn factor would.

1:07:22Rebecca Schinsky:Eight? Nine? Eight and a half?

1:07:25Jeff O'Neal:Eight and a half. That's good.

1:07:28Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. So we have five, four, ten. So we're looking at 15 and a half, 25 and a half. 34 and a half. 34 and a half for that there. We had to. And thank you so much. I'll put this in the show notes at some point. She made these graphs of the zero to well-read score things, which is pretty cool. Awesome.

1:07:43Jeff O'Neal:Thank you. Yeah. If you have a fun idea like that or other feedback for us, you can email us at zero to well read book riot dot com.

1:07:50Rebecca Schinsky:Show notes are at book riot dot com slash. Listen, thanks again to Thrift Books for sponsoring the first season of Zero to Well Read. Zero to Well Read is also a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. And Rebecca, until next time, go to the woods, smoke some weed.

1:08:08Jeff O'Neal:Wait them out.

1:08:14We'll be right back.