#10 Vineland Thomas Pynchon

"Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didnt remember. Many told her, one way or another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave."

Jacket Copy: On California's fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of Sixties survivors and refugees from the "Nixonian Reaction" still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches him that his old nemesis, sinister Federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture--spy thrillers, Ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies--Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in the NYTBR "that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years."

Similar to: Bret Easton Ellis' "The Informers," Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Coupland's "Generation X" 

Highlights:

--full of hilarious one liners about everything in American pop culture-- from the Los Angeles Lakers to Hawaii Five-O.

--although the idea that television is bad for us has been beat to death, he presents that message in a new and interesting way, through the use of satire and sci-fi/fantasy fables

--the distinctions "hero" and "villain" are hard to give to any of the characters in this novel, since they are very complex. this encourages the reader to think about whether things in real life are really ever "black and white" or if maybe the truth lies somewhere more towards the middle

--draws a direct line between Americans' obsession with Television and the end of the 60s counterculture movement; a very interesting theory indeed

--i really enjoyed the way the book wasnt entirely realistic but also wasnt entirely a fantasy universe either. For the most part, this was a story that really could have happened, but the parts that are implausible just make the story more interesting, and more, rather than less, powerful.