Perennial Nobel Prize contender Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland (1990) has been loosely adapted by Paul Thomas Anderson as a new film, One Battle After Another. The film is already considered an Oscar contender.
Vineland, at its core, is preoccupied with the fate of America in the age of mass media and creeping authoritarianism. Pynchon’s novel is largely set in 1984, the year president Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide – a time when the idealism and revolutionary impulses of the American left had withered.
