Reader's Guide to Vineland
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- CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 1
Zoyd prepares to jump through a window, but the Log Jam bar, where he plans to do the deed, has gone upscale -- and seems to have a surprisingly large percentage of gay lumberjacks in it. Zoyd goes instead to the Cucumber Lounge, where the Media waits to record his jump through the window (which this year is a "breakaway" stunt window made of sugar). In the process we meet Ralph Wayvone Jr. and Hector Zuniga.
p. 3 "mental disability check" This instantly identifies Zoyd as a sixties character with a sixties scam. In the late sixties, Bay Area actor/writer Peter Coyote wrote and performed a then-popular song called "ATD" celebrating the coolness of getting onto ATD (Aid to the Totally Disabled) for feigned mental problems to avoid having to work at some evil-collaborative (i.e., straight) job. The trick, of course, was convincing your caseworker that you were a nut. Zoyd's annual window-dive is a comic version of a now-classic ritual-scam turned into a media circus (as are most remains of the sixties). Given the importance of the Tube in Vineland, it's no accident that what was originally a private act of financial desperation has become a filler on TV news (complete with a fake window). Of course, as it turns out, this particular scam is not Zoyd's idea. p. 3 "country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio" Good Mendocino atmosphere throughout; clearly, Pynchon has been there. p. 4 "elegant little...chain saw, about the size of a Mini-Mac" Mini-Mac = the Mac-10 machine pistol of US make. Zoyd's lady-like chainsaw goes well with his drag costume, and the effeminate clientele (drinking "kiwi mimosas.") It also makes a nice almost-rhyme with Sheriff Willis Chunko's gold-handled chainsaw on page 373. p. 6 "orientational vibes" Great satire on gay men who like to dress like lumberjacks, possibly inspired by the Monty Python song, "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK." p. 7 "Six Rivers Conference" To the south of the eerie and mysterious Seventh River? (See p. 49.) p. 7 "nacreous pretty saw" Referring to the mother-of-pearl grips on "Cheryl's" chainsaw. p. 7 "hotshot PI lawyers" PI = Normally short for personal injury, but here perhaps purchase of information, as noted on p. 24. p. 7 "George Lucas and all his crew" The forest sequences of the Star Wars sequel were shot in the area.
p. 9 "cop vehicles...playing the 'Jeopardy' theme on their sirens." The first of many TV show / theme song references. p. 9, 10 "unrelenting...bickering...[caused by] unquiet ghosts" A pre-hint of the Thanatoids? p. 10 "one of those gotta-shit throbs of fear." An apt description, if you've ever felt it. Pynchon seems big on these visceral fear reactions; see also p. 45 ("intestinal pangs of fear"), p. 116 ("stone bowelflash"), p. 207 ("a throb of fear went right up his asshole"), p. 299 ("rectal spasms of fear,") and elsewhere.
previously, speaking directly to characters (and readers) with comments like this. p. 10 "Wayvone" = a play on "rave on?" He's also a remittance man, someone who gets paid a small but regular amount of money to stay in some far-away place. Pynchon seems fond of the type -- there are several in V and Gravity's Rainbow, and the latter even has a remittance horse (named Snake). p. 12 "technical virgin" Meaning Zoyd has more-or-less resisted Zuniga's attempt to "turn" him into an informer/betrayer. The sexual metaphor prefigures many references to Frenesi's pussy (which she blames for driving her far beyond this stage).
CHAPTER 2
Zoyd goes home. We meet his 14-year-old daughter Prairie. There's history/exposition on Zoyd's window stunt. We meet Prairie's boyfriend, punk rocker Isaiah Two Four. Isaiah proposes a "violence theme park." Zoyd sets up Isaiah's band, the Vomitones, with a gig at the (presumably) Mafia wedding of Ralph Wayvone Jr.'s family.
p. 14 "Zoy-oyd..." Prairie is a wonderfully drawn 14-year-old teenager. p. 14 Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story The first of many fictitious movies. It's easy to tell, because Pynchon always provides a bracketed date [1980] when he references a real movie, but not a fictitious one. p. 14 "the Tube" Consistently capitalized throughout the book. p. 14 "a chair-high bag of Chee-tos and a sixpack of grapefruit soda from the health-food store." This combination of junk food and health food defines the North Coast redneck hippie perfectly. But Pynchon's insistent hammering on Zoyd's junk-food habit may go a little deeper -- like autobiography, maybe?
Pynchonian satire of California Psychobabble. p. 16 "Love is strange" Refers to Mickey and Sylvia's song of the same name. Clearly a Pynchonian favorite; he used it as the lead for his New York Times Book Review piece on Love In the Time of Cholera. p. 18 "the Uzi machine gun, 'badass of the desert.'" Pynchon seems moderately hung up on rear ends in this book (and elsewhere). The phrase "badass" recurs constantly (as it did in Gravity's Rainbow too, where it achieved Naval Significance as the USS John E. Badass). In addition there's Trasero County (trasero = Spanish for "rump,") Las Nalgas (Spanish for "buttocks,") and Culito Canyon (culito = Spanish for "little ass.") There's also an echo of Da Conho, the cook in V, whose fantasy involved shooting Muslims in Israel with a .30 caliber machine gun that went "yibble, yibble, yibble." ("Da Conho's machine gun was the only one in the world that went "yibble, yibble," Pynchon pointed out.)
CHAPTER 3 Zuniga muses on his long, strange association with Zoyd, which segues into two flashbacks (first Zuniga's and then Zoyd's) of Zoyd's bachelor days in Gordita Beach, in the Reagan-era Southern California of the sixties. We flip back to the present as Zoyd and Zuniga meet for a chat at the bowling alley. Zuniga asks Zoyd to help him find Frenesi, Zoyd's ex-wife. Flashbacks provide exposition about Frenesi, and Hector is revealed as a TV junkie.
p. 22 "Sylvester and Tweety" The famous animated cartoon characters (a cat and a canary, natch) are used to described the comic/violent relationship between Zoyd and Zuniga. This also works as effective shorthand to encourage the reader to read the book as a cartoon. At least for now.
early fifties that went "Melrose five, five-three-hundred, Melrose five, five-three-hundred..."), musician Scott Oof.
or "soft" drug-user.] The cop raps at the door and says "I'm here about drugs," and the doper says, "Thank God! We're all out!" It's right up there with the one where the cop says, "Your papers, please!" and the head whips out his Zig-Zags. p. 24 "some grandiose pilot project bankrolled with inexhaustible taxpayer millions" Typically Pynchonian paranoid reference. p. 25 "GS-13" Mid-level US Government job rating. Entry level is GS-4; the President is, like, GS-25. p. 26 "hummed a tune..." Distraction drives Hector to humming "Meet the Flintstones," the second TV theme song so far. p. 26 "defunding" The first we learn of Frenesi's demotion/demolition, her "disappearance from the computer," her figurative conversion from a one to a zero. (See note on Pynchon's central binary metaphor, p. 71-72, et al..)
Great rap from Hector, demonstrating Pynchon's flawless ear for dialect and accent. "Who was saved?" ties into the preterite theme.
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