Best 1990 Adventures (2)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 30, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1990 adventure novels.

Thomas Pynchon’s apophenic thriller Vineland.

In 1984, the first year — according to HILOBROW’s periodization schema — of the cultural era we think of as the Eighties, and the midpoint of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Brock Vond, a right-wing government operative, tracks hapless former hippie Zoyd Wheeler down in Vineland, the forest country north of San Francisco, and threatens to ruin his life a second time. Their first encounter, which we read about in flashbacks, happened 15 years earlier — at the height of the Flower Power movement — when Brock seduced Zoyd’s old lady, the radical film-maker Frenesi Gates, not only sexually but ideologically. Frenesi split, leaving Zoyd to raise their now-adolescent daughter Prairie — who, despite her dope-smoking dad’s best efforts, is more Gen-X cynic than flower child. The “Repression,” Zoyd’s Sixties-era term for everything wrong with America, has triumphed, “growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power”; but Zoyd clings, romantically, to a vision of a better world. There’s a lot going on, here: mobbed-up businessmen, a psychic detective, TV addicts, and government agents, not to mention feminist ninjas, a UFO abduction, zombie-ghosts, and a Godzilla-like monster. It’s a political thriller, but also a picaresque, as Zoyd and Prairie hit the road — fleeing from Brock, and seeking the truth not only about Frenesi (who’s left a string of heartbroken hippies in her wake) but America’s counterculture.

Fun facts: Surely an influence — along with The Big Sleep — on the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). Pynchon would return the favor with Inherent Vice (2009), a darkly comic detective novel set in 1970s California featuring Larry “Doc” Sportello, another dope-smoking hippie hero.

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Best 1990 Adventures (2)

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