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.

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

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

"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." - The Bookfish

"The richness of Coviello's understanding of Vineland, the product of an intense engagement with the book across decades, along with his lively and extremely readable style, entirely drew me in. . . Embracing the wilful dissonance of the joyous and grief-stricken it identifies in Vineland, Coviello's Vineland Reread is itself by turns funny and moving." - Textual Practice

"Coviello openly embraces his directive to experiment with the boundaries of literary criticism . . . Combining [a] fresh voice with a few new points in apology for Vineland certainly provides ample tools for anyone who finds themselves in the position of wanting to justify the ongoing importance of Pynchon’s fourth novel." - Orbit: A Journal of American Literature

"In focusing on repeated readings that draw out more and more nuanced arguments as the book and its rereader grow older together, I found myself increasingly curious about Vineland, a book that had never found its way into my “to read” stack before . . . In Coviello’s hands, the “Rereadings” format offers a series of arguments not only about the book in question, but for it." - American Literary History