Pynchon’s Abundance

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.”