Vineland

Thomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of America's countercultural dream

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.

Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs ("Floozy with an Uzi"), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.), Vineland is vintage Pynchon.

'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie