Pynchon Wiki: Vineland

Welcome to the Vineland Wiki

If you wish to contact us or suggest edits, use this Contact page.

This is the wiki for Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Besides using the page-by-page annotation, you can also take a look at Vineland covers, read the reviews, or provide insights or observations.

The Vineland Wiki
The page-by-page annotation section has been seriously kick-started with the incorporation of the "Babies of Wackiness" – A Reader's Guide to Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, thanks to the site's proprietors, John Diebold and Michael Goodwin. Their site still has excellent and insightful summaries of each chapter, but we've incorporated the page-by-page commentary. This wiki is Virgin Territory. Be the first on your block to amaze the world with your perspicacity!

Hawaiian cultural references in Vineland

Vineland Playlist: Songs and artists mentioned in Vineland

Download:
"Index of Fictional Characters, Places & Things in Vineland, compiled by Douglas Albert (PDF)

How to Use this Wiki

The Spoiler-Free Annotations by Page allows the reader to look up and contribute allusions and references while reading the book, in a convenient and spoiler-free manner.

Apart from that, it's up to you.

Page by Page Annotations

An alternate form of commentary on the text. The guiding principle of these annotations is to remain spoiler-free, so that readers can follow along without the fear that later parts of the book will be revealed. The proprietors of Babies of Wackiness, John Diebold and Michael Goodwin, graciously allowed us to incorporate their Reader's Guide to Vineland as a starting point for this section. SPOILER ALERT!!! Many of the spoilers from the Reader's Guide are still in the page-by-page annotations. See the talk page.


Chapter 1
pp. 3-13 		Chapter 2
pp. 14-21 		Chapter 3
pp. 22-34 		Chapter 4
pp. 35-55 		Chapter 5
pp. 56-67
Chapter 6
pp. 68-91 		Chapter 7
pp. 92-106 		Chapter 8
pp. 107-129 		Chapter 9
pp. 130-191 		Chapter 10
pp. 192-203
Chapter 11
pp. 204-217 		Chapter 12
pp. 218-267 		Chapter 13
pp. 268-293 		Chapter 14
pp. 294-322 		Chapter 15
pp. 323-385


Pynchon Wiki Help and Contributor Guidelines

Click here for help with editing and creating pages.

We have a few conventions we ask that you follow:

  • To open a discussion on an individual listing of the Alpha Index or Page by Page Annotations, give it a name that identifies the alpha listing (eg [[Discussion Subject|'''DISCUSSION''']]) and notice that the visible name will be "DISCUSSION" in bold and full caps, so it stands out a bit.

External Links

Featured Article

 

An interesting article by Devin Thomas O’Shea (LitHub) on what lessons we can take from Vineland in 2025, "Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland — a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now": "2025 is shaping up to be the year of the Pynch. After 12 years of silence since Bleeding Edge, the 87-year-old author will publish Shadow Ticket on October 7th, 2025. The new novel concerns Milwaukee in the Great Depression—Hicks McTaggart, “a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye” searches for a missing Wisconsin cheese fortune heiress, who ends up entangled with paranormal, Nazi, Soviet, and British agents. “Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer.”

 
 

Andy Beckett, of The Guardian, recently re-read Vineland and loved it. His article about the experience is insightful. "The relatively modest and heartfelt Vineland began to look more of an achievement: not 'a breather between biggies', but perhaps Pynchon's last fully realised novel."

 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you haven't read Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent and insightful essay on Vineland,"Pynchon's Prayer," originally published in 1990 in the Chicago Reader, now's your opportunity. Along with more of his writings on Pynchon, it's available on his blog. "A superb yet not entirely convincing entertainment, Vineland tries to find some rays of hope in a hopeless period by positing a fearless and resourceful but otherwise unexceptional 14-year-old and her half-buried leftist family history as our last bastion of strength against encroaching fascism."

Gallery

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