PotsandPlots

Towards the end of last year, based on excellent reviews, I decided I wanted to watch One Battle After Another. It’s the film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I like to read books before watching the film version, so I can get my own sense of story and characters before they become hard-coded by the screen interpretation.

Reading Vineland has made me wonder whether I should watch One Battle After Another at all. I will, because I’m intrigued to see how they do it, and because, well, maybe, it will give me more idea of what on earth was going on.

Growing Information:

Plant With: Great American Novelists, Navel-Gazing, Emperor’s New Clothes.

Grows Into: A mess. If a teenage bedroom could be a novel, it would be Vineland.

Rating: Garage Flowers 🌻 

The Review:

The Time Out quote, on the front of my edition, reads “Vineland is one of the funniest, most cleverly written, superbly characterised and beautifully structured books I have read by a living author.” I can only assume they mostly read dead authors.

I honestly don’t understand how anybody can write those words about Vineland. It is funny, and occasionally clever, but it’s also a rambling, frustrating mess that is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Unless it’s clever to make the story so obscure that you repeatedly lose your reader.

I will grant there were times when I was absorbed; wowed by Pynchon’s observations and turns of phrase, but most of the time, I just felt I was reading word after word that only had tenuous links to what had come before.

Yet there is something beguiling about it. As I reached the end, I couldn’t help but wonder about what I’d missed. I wondered even whether I should turn to the front and start again, and see if I can tease more out.

I won’t. Life is too short.

Perhaps rambling obfuscation is the mark of genius, or maybe critics think that saying this book is funny and clever marks them as being geniuses themselves. They probably didn’t get it either.

Conicidentally, I have been listening to Ben Elton’s biography What Have I Done? and there’s a bit in it where he talks about a near-encounter with Harold Pinter – being an audio book, I can’t easily find the quote, but it essentially boiled down to Pinter not being funny, and its only a conspiracy of critics that holds him up as so.

I’ve been to a lot of “high-brow” plays, where the audience seems to think they need to visibly guffaw at anything that sounds vaguely like a joke. “Look at me. I get it. I’m sophisticated.” Unfortunately, it just makes them look like they think they’re at a pantomime.

I’m aware that moaning about people understanding something that I didn’t, maybe says more about me than them, but regardless, I mostly didn’t understand Vineland and didn’t find it entertaining.

Do good books have to entertain? Arguably not, but if you want people to read it and then read your other stuff, it probably helps. On a tangential note, I’ve just finished the first volume of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. On the face of it, this slow tale of a woman doomed to repeat the same day over and over is not entertaining, yet the story is accessible, and I was utterly gripped.

Vineland is perhaps outdated. People being addicted to “The Tube” seems antiquated. I guess you could replace the tube with smartphones, but the “tech is addictive” trope feels tired and worn out. The drugs counter-culture feels like we’ve been there and done that, too. A book published in 1990, set in the 80s, that is supposed to satirise our culture, doesn’t feel fresh in 2026.

Perhaps I should try to read 2025’s Shadow Ticket to compare. Though Kathryn Schulz’s review (via Wikipedia), noted the lack of a clear message: “At some point, though, meaning that is sufficiently cryptic becomes indistinguishable from no meaning at all.” Perhaps nothing has changed in the intervening 35 years.

Many thanks to The Library Guy. Without his Vineland chapter guide, I may never have finished it.