Pynchon’s Abundance

Travis Alexander revisits Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” arguing that it contains a prescient analysis of today’s liberal-leftist divide.

By Travis AlexanderOctober 30, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

To be conservative, then, is to prefer […] present laughter to utopian bliss.
—Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative” (1956)

WHEN THOMAS PYNCHON released Vineland in 1990, it landed with more of a whimper than a bang. The novel arrived as a shaggy—even a bit (cringe!) sentimental—yarn after the coldly polymathic display of Gravity’s Rainbow 17 years earlier. Though it wasn’t, in fact, the reclusive author’s second novel, audiences nonetheless treated it as a sophomore slump—a deflating second act. Upon its release, David Foster Wallace famously wrote to Jonathan Franzen to speculate that the old master had “spent twenty years smoking pot and watching TV.”

Vineland is back in the discourse because it stands as the loose—actually, the very loose—inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another. This reevaluation of Pynchon’s novel couldn’t have come at a better time, since Vineland anticipated with uncanny prescience many of the most central political debates currently being litigated in whatever is meant by the American “Left.”

It is nearly impossible to locate a debate in the anti-MAGA alliance (another imaginary coalition of the sometimes-willing) that isn’t on some level reducible to a division between liberals and progressives, wherein each of those groups believes itself to hold the answer to issues as heterogeneous as trans participation in sports, the rights of Palestinians, and ICE raids. Where liberals might accuse progressives of underestimating the potential of governmental overreach and identity politics, progressives might argue in their turn that liberals underestimate the scale of present injustice and, as a result, serve to abet the status quo. The liberal-progressive fault line essentially underlies the entire debate about the recent killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk (or, for that matter, the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione). In this context, we overlook a novel like Vineland—one that allows those ideas to be examined in human terms—to our own detriment.

Vineland is a book about ex-hippies, parents and children, and the disillusioning (re)education of 1960s idealism. But it is also, beyond and beneath that, an allegory about the fellow-traveling ideologies of liberalism and progressivism. It explores these systems’ common purposes, and then, more importantly, it investigates the fault lines dividing them—rifts, as the novel ultimately shows, whose depth can dissemble their reparability. By representing these ideologies in characters with backstories, psychologies, and histories—with desires, prejudices, and flaws—the novel does what novels do best: it renders abstractions concrete, and thereby makes their impact on human lives immediate and intuitive. In short, fiction thinks, helps us think, and solves problems every bit as pragmatically as journalism, documentary, and other ostensibly truth-telling forms do.

Moreover, if Vineland is a novel about the fractious factions constituting the American Left, it’s also, because of that, a novel about California. It’s not simply set in the Golden State; it’s centrally, lovingly, totally obsessed with it. It’s about the way that progressivism and liberalism flowered not just in 1960s California but also because of 1960s California. It’s about the intertwined California roots of those two ideologies, twisting their way back to the Gold Rush. And it’s about the hard-line conservatism that has been equally decisive there. If California incubated the utopian experiments of the Left—both its Old and New varieties—then it was equally nurturing to counterrevolutionary reaction. COINTELPRO and Orange County, in other words, are as Californian as Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love. And the Nixonian/Reaganite retrenchments weren’t so much aberrant as paradigmatic. Conservatism has always flourished on the coast.

But if Vineland is a novelistic account of California’s history, it’s also—or can be, anyway—a novel with a vision for the state’s future. Because of both its sheer size and its centrality in the national imagination, California, too, looms large in so many of the Left’s political debates and designs today. As goes California—regardless the fate of Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions—so goes, to some extent, the Democratic Party, and with it, for better and worse, the largest institutional power centers in American left-wing politics. It’s no accident that such a salient chunk of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s buzzy new volume Abundance turns to the Golden State as a trial balloon for ideas they would have the Democratic Party adopt at scale.

If, as Louis Brandeis wrote, states function as “laboratories of democracy,” then Vineland sees California, to abuse the metaphor only slightly, as the primary investigator in that lab network. In Pynchon’s novel, liberal and progressive approaches—and through them, counterposed Californian spirits—mingle and vie for our affection and trust. The novel thus reaches forward across 35 years of literary time to offer ideas on how the American Left might endure, and on California’s role in that survival.

It’s not, in other words, all pot and TV. But there’s a lot of pot and TV.

¤

When Vineland opens, the year is 1984 and the place is Vineland, California. The Summer of Love is long in the rearview mirror, but its specters haunt the Reaganite present. Our reluctant hero, ex-hippie Zoyd Wheeler, lives in Vineland—a fictionalized landscape somewhere between Humboldt and Mendocino—with his teenage daughter, Prairie. Their bucolic peace is interrupted when federal agents from Zoyd’s past alert him to the fact that Frenesi Gates, his ex and Prairie’s long-gone mom, might be in touch with him soon. Presumed to be in witness protection and now on the run, Frenesi is being pursued by the final boss of the G-men, Brock Vond. Back in the hippie days, Vond turned Frenesi—once the charter member of a radical film collective called 24fps—into a government asset and, at about the same time, into his lover. After he had her orchestrate the killing of a hippie guru in the film collective’s orbit, Vond disappeared her into federal obscurity. Now she’s on the run, and Zoyd’s shaggy Eden is interrupted. Our kind-of hero’s kind-of journey can begin.

As to Zoyd’s background, we’re largely in the dark, as if to emphasize his consummation of the midcentury American imagination: homo de novo, a man with not much past, not much history, not much ideology, body alone, pure present. That’s not the case with Frenesi, on both sides of whose ancestral tree run radical leftist energies: Spanish anti-Franco partisans, union organizers, CPUSA members, blacklisted Hollywood hands. Pynchon’s writing never treats characters only as emblems of belief systems. But it would be daft to say that Zoyd and Frenesi don’t embody, respectively, liberal and progressive energies.

And so as (among other things) an embodiment of progressivism, Frenesi is a believer in causes and comes by her righteous certitude naturally. She sees history—through her parents’ tutelage—as an inevitable dialectic we’re thrust into, as a churning drama between the powerful and the weak, between the dastardly and the just. These, for her, are truths. History is a science, and our role is to play our part in resolving its contradictions. Zoyd, by contrast, seems primarily to believe in the grace of drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and, later, his daughter. Odd as it may seem to ennoble these appetites as indicative of ideology, they are. Zoyd reads history—to the extent he does so at all, which is to say, not much—not as tragic opera but as screwball comedy, and our role in it as absurdist seekers of elective affinity, of transient pleasures and local loves.

For Frenesi, unsurprisingly, the world is binaristic, as befits the novel’s—and, generally, Pynchon’s—fascination with digital computation. “[E]verything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zero,” Frenesi thinks to herself. As such, people—for her—could easily be turned into “weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence.” Since “we are digits in God’s computer,” therefore, “what we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, […] all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God,” Frenesi self-soothes. She finds order and peace in this anti-humanizing reduction to digital weightlessness. Thus, Frenesi is drawn to progressive ideologies—and, later, to the film collective—because they offer her “a world of simplicity and certainty.” She sees individual humans merely as members of world-historical aggregates, as parts of a class, a totality, a monolith, and thus, really, not as individuals at all: weightless, except as ideas made flesh.

In contrast, Frenesi thinks, “no acidhead […] would ever find” a world like hers—one “based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths.” By this, we should picture the feckless (liberal) Zoyds of the world. She craves blacks and whites. And the logic of revolution—of imperialists and the wretched of the earth, of jackboots and the once and future sovereignty of the people—supplies it. For her, history must move forward, change must triumph over (or “transcend”) stasis: the “single presence” of the proletarian commonwealth will arrive like “a moving blade,” and can only be delayed or hastened.

This certainty—that there is a moral universe, that it has an arc, and that that arc “bends toward justice,” to invoke Martin Luther King Jr.’s adaptation of the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker—is the very foundation of progressive thought. 24fps inflames and validates Frenesi’s fantasy. And, for what it’s worth, Frenesi’s ethos of “simplicity and certainty” here has often found expression in (actual) California politics. It is of course true that other states on the left side of the dial have, in their turn, pursued a values-driven, interventionist, and absolutist (what I’m inclined to call romantic) style of governance. But it seems equally inarguable that those pushes happened in California first, and at greater scale. One thinks here, hastily and in brief, of policies from the California Environmental Quality Act, Prop 47, or the “California Rule” of pension perpetuity. All of which is, of course, not to discount the equally Californian political ethos represented, for instance, by Jerry Brown, whose pragmatic skepticism of central planning has—with a distinctly wonky twist—a Zoydian quality.

As even Frenesi’s closest friends know, there is an irreducibly immature aspect to this line of thought. It bespeaks a “romance,” after all, and therefore a fairy tale. When Frenesi’s collaborator DL first meets her, DL describes feeling “like an adult come upon a little kid alone at a dangerous time of day, not yet aware of her mom’s absence.” If the “dream of transcendence” is, in all its annoyingly Nietzschean splendor, technically more adolescent than “little kid,” both are stages of immaturity.

Vond, too, believes he’s discerned a childishness in the idealism of Frenesi and radicals of her stripe:

[His] genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep—if he allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. […] [The hippies had] only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning. […]

[They were] the sort of mild herd creatures […] who’d feel, let’s face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline.

Vond might be onto something too, at least in Frenesi’s case. In a telling and hilarious moment, Pynchon describes Frenesi watching CHiPS—the “perennial motorcycle-cop favorite.” As it comes on, Frenesi feels an erotic “rising of blood.” “Let the grim feminist rave,” she thinks to herself:

[T]here were living women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to [CHiPS] reruns on the tube, and so what?

Frenesi’s equally radical mother Sasha shares the same irrepressible fantasy about authority figures:

Sasha believed her daughter had “gotten” this uniform fetish from her. […] [Sasha had] felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men […] and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control. […] Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every time the troops came marching by, that wetness of attention and perhaps ancestral curse. Just for its political incorrectness alone, Frenesi had at first reacted to Sasha’s theory with anger.

This is actually, for my purposes, the conceptual money shot of the whole novel. In classic Pynchonian fashion, this surreal comic expanse actually encodes a deceptive political provocation. In her black-and-white certainties, her essentially eschatological understandings of the world, Frenesi operates on the same code, the same conceptual DNA, as arch squares like Brock Vond. They may breathe different smoke, but, occupying two extremities of the fabled horseshoe, they are closer than their notional allegiances might suggest. Frenesi is attracted not just to Vond but to authority everywhere: she craves it for her own political ends. Some factions within the Left have always been in the game at least in part for the thrill of eventually (and, hopefully, sooner rather than later!) remanding nonbelievers to the Gulag for reeducation.

Of course, if Frenesi’s political avatars have always been active in California, so too have Vond’s. As Pynchon has always known, going back to the (actual) Nazis in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), hard-line conservatism has long been part and parcel of California’s “abundance,” whether in the form of Proposition 187, the governorship of George Deukmejian, the formation of the anticommunist Minutemen paramilitary, or the so-called “taxpayer revolt” of the 1970s across Orange County and the San Fernando Valley.

And then—in opposition to Frenesi’s and Vond’s politics and yet, if plotted on a right-left spectrum, lying between them—there’s Zoyd: dweeby, lazy, trusty Zoyd. So much does he lack the binary view of the world shared by Frenesi and Vond that he finds a strange calm even in discovering that his ex–old lady had long been two-timing him with Vond, and then had taken another man as her husband in witness protection and adopted that man’s children as her own. As Zoyd’s friend Van Meter ribs him over his fate, he only “s[its] there nodding How true, how true.” Zoyd’s only reply: “Appreciate the support ol’ buddy, but I was still happy to be out of Hector’s way back then ’thout gittin’ my ass in too major of a sling.” And yet this untroubled approach isn’t any New Age, pop-therapeutic “radical acceptance.” Because radical acceptance is also ideological, also a system of belief—all of which is way too programmatic for lazy, shaggy, the Dude–like Zoyd. Frenesi, he thinks dreamily, “might be gone, but there would always be his love for Prairie, burning like a night-light, always nearby, cool and low, but all night long.” And the tenderness is reciprocal—Prairie (and clearly the novelist too) feels a rush of warmth for “this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father.”

Zoyd prefers present laughter to utopian bliss—a preference attributed to conservatives by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott. But Zoyd’s is a conservatism with the smallest of Cs. It is a kind of conservatism that could, without paradox, be described as liberal conservatism, or conservative liberalism. Zoyd’s liberalism posits no specific virtues or essential facets of the good life. It is skeptical about the feasibility of grand projects (and therefore of “Progress” with a capital P) and instead attempts to clear space for individual pursuits of happiness—even and especially small forms of happiness, like drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Or, for that matter, daughters. Zoyd wants only to be left alone to his pursuits—quests, if not for anything so grand as “the good life,” then for small acts of care, pleasure, and freedom. In this sense, my positioning of Zoyd and Frenesi as representing counterposed political ideologies doesn’t mean or require that Zoyd sees himself as Frenesi’s sparring partner. He’s not really opinionated enough for that—or for much of anything. Zoyd’s indifference makes him a representative not so much of the liberal individual—a person who, after all, must have some attitudes (atheism, for instance, or nationalism, or … whatever)—but of liberalism itself: that is, the system that maintains equal access (at least in theory) to those preferences.

But Vineland doesn’t leave us marooned at the impasse of these two systems—not exactly, anyway. Without sketching out methods of political synthesis explicitly, or, for that matter, abandoning its cool ironies and referential densities (that kind of sentimental surrender, after all, would be cringe), Pynchon nonetheless implies that liberals and progressives are destined to share a future. Separated for almost the entirety of the novel, Zoyd and Frenesi reunite in its final pages. Indeed, Vineland closes on the Gates family’s reunion—left harmonies made flesh, in defiance of the Reaganite heat always around the corner. Prairie, then, isn’t just reunited with her mother; she literally incarnates her parents’ synthesis, representing—maybe—a utopian hope of pluralist solidarity, even if the novel itself identifies with Zoyd’s side of the romantic and ideological divorce by some margin.

¤

The novel, of course—in its own disinclination to reduce—strains against the simplistic allegory I’ve extracted from it here. It doesn’t go in for crude chains of equivalence: Zoyd equals liberalism and therefore is the hero, where Frenesi equals progressivism and therefore is the villain. It, too, prefers people to ideas. It wants desperately—even, to quote one of Pynchon’s later novels, against the day— not to believe that human beings are weightless ones and zeros in the hacker god’s computer. But Vineland does nonetheless, whether it was Pynchon’s design or not, engage with ideas, with counterposed political philosophies, with ways of doing and living leftist politics. And just because the novel isn’t only an allegory doesn’t mean we can’t profitably derive one from it. As the German theorist Walter Benjamin once observed, certain aspects of the past lie dormant, unrecognized and unrecognizable, until something in their future—and our present—retroactively irradiates them, enabling their emergence from obscurity into legibility. The present therefore makes a past that, paradoxically, was already there. Likewise, I think, our political dilemmas can illuminate an allegorical energy lying dormant in Pynchon’s amusing little TV-and-pot novel.

In fact, this strange historical constellation—this kind of pre-amnesia in which a reality achieves cultural perception only retroactively—may well be the reason (one of them anyway) that Vineland was remaindered by the literary cognoscenti as minor Pynchon in 1990. To be released in that year was to be released into a world where liberalism—of the kind recently eulogized by Thomas Chatterton Williams in his new polemic Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse or in the pages of journals like Liberties, Persuasion, The Bulwark, and The Argument—was no longer ascendant but was total, everywhere, complete. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR was crumbling, and Francis Fukuyama was soon to announce that history itself had reached its conclusion. We were living in what Bret Easton Ellis has evocatively called “Empire”: end-of-republic Pax Americana hegemony. Progressivism—especially in its radical form—simply wasn’t within the Overton window of American political or cultural life. Two years after Vineland’s release, Bill Clinton would run a successful campaign by jettisoning whatever remained of the progressive impulse, hanging it like a millstone around the failed campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and especially Michael Dukakis. So the novel’s dramatization of progressive thought as a competitor to the old liberalism would intuitively have seemed moot if it was visible at all. Vineland, then, was just too early to its own party.

It’s a different story today. The American Left now finds itself at a genuine crossroads—a pass marked more often than not by the liberal-progressive either/or. A conspicuous number of these problems even take California politics as their explicit or implied terrain. And to that extent, the time for Pynchon’s most sentimental novel has come. To be sure, Vineland has a stake in that debate. But—and here its oft-focalized sentimentality comes to bear—it also prophesies a workable ending for the motley leftist coalition. This won’t be a “mysterious people’s oneness” so much as a family reunion—in other words, an argument, and then maybe some TV and pot.