Vineland
For all that, Vineland is pretty much nobody’s favorite Pynchon novel. Published in 1990, the first of Pynchon’s novels to appear after the Literary Event that was Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), it was soon enough eclipsed by Mason & Dixon (1997) and has been held ever since in middling esteem. (One exception is Salman Rushdie’s warmly appreciative review in the New York Times.) None of this is unfair exactly: the novel is a baggy, digressive, shaggy dogish sort of mess. It is also among the most ludicrously funny novels, sentence by sentence, you’re likely ever to read, as committed to puns, punch lines, and a romping unbridled silliness as it is to philosophic seriousness. Given the obscuring fogs of unjoyous, exalting, serious appraisal—call it, for short, male—that have gathered around Pynchon and his works since the 1970s, it’s easy to forget how cherishable a thing this is.