Salman Rushdie no relation Vineland
Vineland
Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland, was published in 1990 and disappointed some fans and critics. It did, however, receive a positive review from Salman Rushdie, who called it "free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with... the entropy's still flowing, but there is something new to report, some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace. Thomas Pynchon, like Paul Simon's girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human Trampoline, is bouncing into Graceland." The novel is set in California in the 1980s and 1960s and describes the relationship between an FBI COINTELPRO agent and a female radical filmmaker. Its strong socio-political undercurrents detail the constant battle between authoritarianism and communalism, and the nexus between resistance and complicity, but with a typically Pynchonian sense of humor.In 1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, he has been frequently cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pynchon provided a blurb for Don DeLillo's novel Mao II, about a reclusive novelist and partly inspired by the fatwa on Salman Rushdie: "This novel's a beauty. DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond all the official versions of our daily history, behind all the easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."