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Vineland is downplayed by Pynchon fans and completely ignored by curious newbies, who tend to pass over it in favour either of the big-game status of one of his doorstop meganovels, or of the appealing slenderness of The Crying of Lot 49. Shame. All his gifts and his mysteries are on display here, wrapped up in one of his most enjoyable, inexplicable, and lushly all-enveloping plots. Rereading it now, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s terribly underrated.

The essential storyline, if there is one, concerns the quest of fourteen-year-old Prairie to find her long-lost mother Frenesi, a hippy-chick revolutionary turned government informer, who has left a string of lovesick boys and girls wherever she’s been. But around this kernel Pynchon deposits layer upon layer of sub-plots, super-plots, side-plots and inter-plots until you are wading thigh-deep through new characters, new locations, new sensations, on every page.

It reads chaotically, but the chaos is intricately plotted. Pynchon is doing twenty things at once in this book, and all of them brilliantly. Prairie’s story is set in the 1980s, but the key events in Frenesi’s life happened fifteen or twenty years before that � and what Vineland is really about is what happened to that generation. How the counterculture kids of the 1960s turned into the Reagan voters of the 1980s. In that sense it’s a political novel.

OK, a political novel, all right � but that doesn’t really explain the experience of this book, does it? Because along the way we have a psychic detective investigating a Godzilla attack, we have a UFO abduction during a passenger flight to Hawaii, we have a community of kunoichi, or female ninjas, in the Californian hills, a political prison deep in a nuclear fallout shelter, a Tokyo sex auction, a community of zombie-ghosts, and a potted history of mallrats. Often these incidents are slipped in obliquely, so that you put the book down blinking, as though coming up from hypnosis, thinking vaguely –�did I really read that�? Did I get that impression from the words on the page, or was I imagining something on my own initiative? Pynchon is a master at palming ideas off unseen, adding more and more dependent clauses to his sentences, pushing the key information further and further down, so that it seeps in through a kind of osmosis and, though you understand what he’s talking about, you don’t quite recall being told.

This sense of fluidity is abetted by his extraordinary ability to slip-'n'-slide time and place when you least expect it, jumping in and out of different timezones without the usual formalities but without, also, any jarringly ‘experimental� effects. Have a look at what happens during this conversation sometime in the 1970s, where Prairie’s dad Zoyd is talking to a friend about finding somewhere to stay near Frenesi’s family:

“On the one hand, you don’t want this turning into your mother-in-law’s trip, on the other hand, they might know about someplace to crash, if so don’t forget your old pal, a garage, a woodshed, a outhouse, don’t matter, ’s just me and Chloe.�

“Chloe your dog? Oh yeah, you brought her up?�

“Think she’s pregnant. Don’t know if it happened here or down south.� But they all turned out to look like their mother, and each then went on to begin a dynasty in Vineland, from among one of whose litters, picked out for the gleam in his eye, was to come Zoyd and Prairie’s dog, Desmond. By that time Zoyd had found a piece of land with a drilled well up off Vegetable Road, bought a trailer from a couple headed back to L.A., and was starting to put together a full day’s work�

Whoa, whoa, whoa, did you catch that? We just panned down to the dog for half a sentence, and before you know it we’ve followed two generations of puppies all the way through a quick ten years, so that Pynchon can now sleight-of-hand straight into a conversation in the '80s without having to do any ponderous throat-clearing of the ‘Several years later…� variety. He pulls this shit on every page and he is GOOD at it. Most of them you won’t even notice.

Pynchon’s women, as always, are cool and concupiscent, but the horniness is balanced here – uniquely in his oeuvre � by having a wry female protagonist who is never sexualised. Prairie is unflappable, observant, the writing never patronises her – she’s one of the great teenage girls in fiction.

Frenesi, by contrast, is the archetypal Pynchonic femme fatale, replaying the author’s usual paranoid sexual fantasy of how nice girls just can’t resist the manly charms of the Asshole King, who goes here by the name of Brock Vond, a federal neofascist who’s eagerly prosecuting the Republicans� War on Drugs. A lot of people who discuss Vineland find Frenesi’s motivation implausible � would she really throw everything away, her politics, her principles, her daughter, just because she can’t stop fucking this guy? And is Pynchon really going to hinge his entire Heath Robinson plot on such a flimsy velleity?

Yeah, he is, and the book doesn’t get enough credit for playing such a calculated move. ‘I’m not some pure creature,� Frenesi agonises at one point, during a painful imagined break-up with a girlfriend who put her on the usual pedestal – ‘you know what happens when my pussy’s runnin' the show…� It’s a dynamic played out in almost all his books, but the collateral resonances are nowhere made more obvious, the D/S overtones in her submission to Brock prefiguring something essential about what happened to her whole generation:

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it.

There’s the whole novel in a sentence. Does Pynchon believe it? Say rather that it’s his secret fear. That’s why it’s necessary for it to play out on the interpersonal level too, which pretty soon, given his characters, comes round to some kind of Sylvia Plathlike every-woman-adores-a-fascist deal.

Vineland is infused with a genuine, unfashionable nostalgia for the acid dreams of the Sixties, but a nostalgia tempered by the resolve to assess the roots of its failures as time went by and ‘revolution went blending into commerce�. Against these incursions all he can offer are the tried and tested defences of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scablands garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

You can sink into this book and swim in it, and the pages will close up over your head. It’s just beautifully made – hilarious and sexy and sad and constantly provocative. And it has more to say about what the 1980s were really about than any number of Brett Easton Ellis or Martin Amis or Jonathan Coe novels can manage. Perhaps it’s not objectively his best book, but it is, for my money, his most fun.