Vineland Reread - (Rereadings) by Peter Coviello (Paperback)

About the Book

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked book opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

Book Synopsis

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon's return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity's Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon's writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland, Coviello reads Pynchon's offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon's harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

Review Quotes

[A] penetrating and nuanced work of literary criticism. . . Coviello's astute and passionate analysis is a pleasure to read.-- "Publishers Weekly"

A New York Times 'New & Noteworthy' pick-- "New York Times"

Coviello makes a convincing case for [Vineland]'s prescience, its subtlety, its loss-haunted history of America, and -- above all, and most powerfully in this smart, funny, inventive passionate book -- its syntactic joys.--Steve Mentz "The Bookfish"

I don't even particularly like Thomas Pynchon! But I could read Peter Coviello rereading Vineland for days, not least because I, too, return at regular intervals to a small set of novels to keep myself "attached to life," in Coviello's phrase. Chronicling that species of attachment, Vineland Reread traces Coviello's readerly imagination of the past and future of the United States via Pynchon's "novel-length calibration, keyed to unresigned comedy, of acute political grief." The result is an account of literary experience that is as ethically and politically urgent as it is sparkling, vital, and fun to read.--Gloria Fisk, author of Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature

With his latest work, it becomes clear that Peter Coviello has achieved something rare: a literary analysis that both historicizes its object and overcomes an alienation between the subject and the object itself. Coviello--nearly alone among contemporary literary critics--joins in the project of his objects, making of them something more wonderful than they would be without his attention. We should be so lucky to be read by him.--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

Here is a mash note, a fan's riff, a sizzling study of Pynchon's most misapprehended book, as well as a persuasive argument for its prescience and relevance. Coviello writes with a generous spirit and vibrant clarity about the aesthetic and political stakes of Vineland, and of the novel in general, and traces with elegance and insight the ways Pynchon's engagement with the central tensions of these last few American centuries shaped his narrative. But Vineland Reread is also a primer on how one can be both judicious and joyful in the act of criticism; rigorous on the one hand, but brave enough to double down on your affections, too. It shows us how to love a work of art honestly, communally. We need readers and thinkers like Peter Coviello now more than ever.--Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark

There's no smarter or more generous guide than Peter Coviello to the experience of loving and living together with books and music. In this deft small volume, Coviello's tender gregarious mind returns to Vineland, Thomas Pynchon's awkward middle child of a novel. He finds there exemplary lessons in how even our first, bad readings help people build a sustaining social world. And he explains why such intimate sodalities coexist with the deep "political grief" caused by society's submission to carceral capitalism.--Matthew Hart, author of Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction

Vineland Reread is a delight. Peter Coviello tells a sweet and joyous story about how to read and reread a treasured book, about how reading is an act that makes meaning, and about how that meaning anchors our lives. This is the rare work that will please everyone--scholars of Pynchon, readers of Vineland, adoring fans, and hardened skeptics--with gorgeous sentences that sparkle generously as they both describe and perform the best of what criticism is and can be.--Jordan Alexander Stein, author of When Novels Were Books

About the Author

Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books include Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (2018) and Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (2019).