Peter Coviello - Vineland Reread

W hen I was young and stupid about bookswhen I was stupid about books the way teenagers are stupid about pop songs, the way new lovers are stupid in the springthis thing happened to me once at an airport. This is a true story. It takes place, I am certain, in July of 1994, in one of the smaller gate areas at Chicagos OHare Airport. I am reading a novel. And I am having an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has sat in the back of a lecture hall, a board meeting, a ballet recitalany sufficiently austere locale will doand been overcome with wave after unstoppable wave of inappropriate hilarity. One of my students has a great phrase for this: the church giggles, he calls it. Its when you know you mustnt laugh but feel that the effort to restrain that laughter will cause such outrageous pressure to build up in your chest, at your temples, and behind your teeth that you will likely suffer some rupture, some ghastly internal implosion, and there youll be, inexplicably dead in the fourth pew.

So there I am in this cramped gate, and the impatient fidgets and scowls of displeasure are almost universal among my few fellow travelers. And I am, as I say, reading a novel. I am working my way through this novel in which each successive sentence, and eventually each new-turned clause, is striking me as funny in a way nothing in gods green creation has ever been funny before, as just gaspingly, garishly, stupidly funny. And Im sniffling and wheezing and willing my breath into yogic equanimity and basically doing everything in my mortal power toas I keep telling myselfkeep my shit together and not disrupt this funereal airport silence with some mortifying detonation of mirth. Whereupon, balanced on this razors edge of self-restraint, I read a passage, and land in fact on one wordit is the following proper name: Blodwenand Im done.

Now, the phrase explode with laughter is in many respects an odd one, not least in its flirtation with the literal. In this case, though, it is entirely apt. For then and there, in successive bodylong convulsions, all that I had labored to contain burst grenade-like from me, and I surrendered to a fit of mad hilarity so wracking and complete that only when it had begun to subside did I notice a few of the following things: that tears were pouring in slick streams down my face; that my nose was running horribly; that, at about the volume of a barking dog, I had been hoarsely laughing, and was still; and that my fellow travelers, some of them in states of poorly concealed alarm, were inching sidelong away from me as far as the limited quarters would allow. I dont know if any of you will have had the experience of exploding inappropriately in public like this. I can say that it was, for me, at once terribly shameful and completely exhilarating. And what Im about to tell you truly did happen. As my gasping and hooting began to subside, this very kindly woman of probably about the age I am now approached me, put a gentle hand on my arm, and said, Excuse me, what book are you reading?

And I snuffled, Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon.

She straightened up and regarded me with a small even smile. Well, she said, Weve got a minute yet. I bet theyve got a Waterstones somewhere in here. And off she went.

Vineland is no ones most beloved Pynchon novel; on a lot of days, its not even mine. Published in 1990, the first of Pynchons novels to appear after the Literary Event that was Gravitys Rainbow, from 1973, it was soon enough eclipsed by the appearance just a few short years later of Mason & Dixon (1997) and has been held ever since in what might fairly be called middling esteem. This has shown some signs of shifting; the fact that some of its characters and family dynasties have themselves come to revivified life in later Pynchon works, like Against the Day and Vinelands nearest companion, Inherent Vice, has made for some more generous recalibrations. Still, it is no ones Gravitys Rainbow and no ones Mason & Dixon.

None of this is especially unjust, and I promise you Im not here to settle scores in these teacup debates. For the creation of a more just set of Pynchon listicles or for a Bloomian tabulation of aesthetic achievement, least to most, you will, alas, have to turn elsewhere. Yet it is genuinely striking: when it comes time to roll out those only half-unserious superlatives in which academic discourse often traffics in its off-hoursin conference anterooms, at dinner tables, at the bar