Zoyd is a typically cartoonish Pynchon character, equal parts Homer Simpson and the Dude in The Big Lebowski, but unlike previous Pynchon protagonists, there's a depth and a sadness to him. It is 1984, the height of Ronald Reagan's rightwing ascendancy, and the tentacles of the American state are reaching into the crevices where former 60s rebels such as Wheeler have been scratching a living relatively undisturbed for the past decade and a half. Vineland begins in a small northern Californian city of the same name, fictional but incorporating elements – misty weather, marijuana production, a freewheeling, end-of-the-road population – of existing local settlements. But in 1993, as soon as I started reading the book, I forgot all about his professional arc. Pynchon's post- Vineland career hasn't quite turned out like that. Gray concluded: "There seems to have been a little downscaling going on." In the Nation, John Leonard suggested an explanation: Vineland was " a breather between biggies", a John the Baptist of a novel preparing the ground for "another, darker, magisterial" Pynchon production. In a typical response in Time magazine, Paul Gray compared an early, lovingly drawn scene of greedy birds stealing food from a dog bowl left outside by the absent-minded main character, Zoyd Wheeler, with the dazzling opening panorama in Gravity's Rainbow of a V-2 rocket descending on London ("A screaming comes across the sky. In fact, Vineland was less than 400 pages long, largely American rather than international in its settings, realistic in style for long stretches, and relatively earnest, even sentimental, compared with what Pynchon had previously written. A 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American civil war?" "Mason and Dixon? A Japanese science-fiction novel?.
"We heard he was doing something about Lewis and Clark," Salman Rushdie wrote in the New York Times in 1990. Pynchon's previous novel, the seemingly all-encompassing second world war adventure and postmodern box of tricks Gravity's Rainbow, had been published in 1973 during the 17-year wait for a follow-up, all sorts of rumours had spread about what the famously brainy and reclusive American prodigy, only 35 in 1973, would produce next. The book had come out three years earlier, to approving but subtly disappointed reviews.
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