Peter Coviello Books

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow , it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.Beginning with his early besotted encounters with Vineland , Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

"Is There God After Prince? is a book about loving things (books, songs, poems, people) in the shadow of looming disaster. Coviello's dazzling, highly personal essays address pieces of contemporary culture across an expansive range--songs by Prince, Joni Mitchell, SZA, and Phoebe Bridgers, writings by Sam Lipsyte, Paula Fox, Paul Beatty, and Dana Spiotta, movies like Heathers, TV shows like The Sopranos, as well as videos, poems, and other pop artefacts. Coviello places these artefacts back in the scenes where he first found them and traces what they did there, whether private (a kid's graduation, an aging parent, a divorce) or public (an election, a pandemic). Laced throughout is a queasy fascination with signs that so much is now coming to an end. It is on this terrain of endstrickenness, as Coviello calls it, that the book lingers, though it does so often in the mood of a startled joyousness, one that these pieces are at pains to understand. Cumulatively, Is There God After Prince? wants to be a model for what criticism can do--what it can sound like, how much sorrow and delight it can get into one place--in an era of Last Things"--