Books: November 2025
Vineland — Thomas Pynchon
⭐⭐⭐⭐ > Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family.
Pynchon’s books feel like they are either about the plot or about the writing: at one extreme he is doing insane free-jazz with language and at the other it’s paint-by-numbers storytelling. If [[Mason & Dixon]] is closer to the free jazz extreme, Vineland is closer to a plain vanilla story, at least by Pynchonian standards. Unsurprisingly, I liked it much better than M&D. It has a lot of similarities to Inherent Vice but is nowhere near as funny or engaging.
What makes Vineland stand out is Frenesi, a (former?) radical and mother who falls for the fed (Brock Vond) who is on her tail and, in the process, abandons her daughter and partner. Vineland is a world of radicals whose time has passed, who have compromised, where movements are disintegrating, and it is not clear what comes next. We see this through the eyes of Prairie, Frenesi’s daughter, for whom this world of radical / hippie / counterculture is already the prior generation’s thing, something in the past, marked by betrayal.
What’s interesting about the world Pynchon sets up is that it is not so clear why this has happened, just as it is never clear why Frenesi falls for Vond. It is not the case that the feds simply dismantled all these movements, that this is a story about successful, violent counter-revolution. Something more subtle happened, more organic, a kind of drift. The Tube certainly has something to do with it, the commodification of the counter-culture. But it is more as though the Tube picked up on something that was already there, a tendency towards conformism. Besides all that, Prairie and Zoyd’s relationship is very sweet.
Look forward to seeing what PTA did with this.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen
⭐⭐ There’s a spectrum of writing about authoritarian countries. At one extreme are those who see virtually no discernible difference between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes. At the other extreme are writers like Masha Gessen, who will not concede even an air of similarity, the latter literally “totalitarian” and pathological down to its very culture. Both of these extremes seem off.
I did not like the tone of this book, which insists on not just describing events on the ground but telling the reader how they should feel about them. This gets tedious: when the police beat up peaceful protestors, I don’t need to be told this is a “brutal violation of human rights.” By the same token, we are given precious little description of Alexander Dugin’s worldview, which Gessen sees as post-hoc nonsense. As a non Russian-speaker I would have liked to actually learn what he’s arguing.
It reminded me of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands in this way. With Gessen’s book, however, it is perhaps more justifiable because what she is actually doing is something more formally interesting, blending parts of her life story into a kind of political memoir. The memoir portions and the descriptions of life under Putin are where the book shines.
Why has Putin ruled Russia for so long? For Gessen, the answer is highly pessimistic: the Russian people developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome during the Soviet Union and want nothing more than to go back. This is a highly cultural, psychological explanation that is not convincing. But one gets the sense Gessen is also speaking out of anger, which is understandable.
Could have been 70% as long.
Zen at War — Brian Daizen Victoria
⭐⭐ If there’s one religion that, at the level of stereotype, seems least amenable to violence, it is Buddhism. Yet Buddhists have and continue to commit violence in different parts of the world. How do Buddhists make sense of their actions, in light of their beliefs? Zen at War examines this question around the time of Japan’s rising imperial ambitions, from its wars with China and Russia, conquest of Korea, and through WW2.
Rather than focus on soldiers or military leaders who might nominally be Buddhists but are primarily something else, Victoria focuses on the harder case of clergy, Zen masters, prominent Buddhist leaders. Here, the result is very depressing: the Buddhist leadership, top to bottom, justified and supported Japan’s war effort and imperial ambitions.
One could imagine a religion that supported war via charity, taking care of the sick, supporting the war effort indirectly. But Japanese Buddhists aggressively propagandized in favor of the war effort and its inherent justice. In Victoria’s telling, this was ultimately about securing Buddhism’s place within the Japanese state, a status that was shaky especially early on, when periods of nationalist fervor saw the state advocate for indigenous Shinto religions over the foreign-born Buddhist religion. A few Buddhists, especially those closer to laymen than priests, did resist, but paid dearly.
Did these leaders do this cynically? And did their actions have some basis in Buddhist teachings? Victoria goes into painstaking detail of how Buddhist leadership justified Japanese imperialism in Buddhist doctrine. None of it is convincing; it all sounds like the kind of vague, religious circular reasoning we’ve heard elsewhere.
The second part of what makes this book fascinating is that Brian Daizen Victoria is himself a Zen Buddhist priest. His interest in this topic came from his anti-war activism during the Vietnam War, which put him at odds with American Buddhist leadership. The Zen Buddhists do not come across well in this book, which begs the question of how Victoria can sit with his beliefs and doctrinal affiliation while being so aware of the tradition’s history.
Well done but giving it a low rating because of how narrow it is.
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus — Rick Perlstein
⭐⭐⭐ Before the Storm ends with Goldwater losing in a landslide to LBJ, and GOP leadership, pundits, and analysts proclaiming that a continued shift towards conservatism would doom the party forever. The lesson was that “extremism in the defense of liberty…” could not work at the ballot box. Of course, the shift toward conservatism would happen anyway, and it would pay dividends with Reagan.
This book was written well before the Trump era, which makes the parallels between Trump and Goldwater all the more interesting. Both effectively took their party’s nomination against the establishment’s wishes by tapping into a political energy that was, at the time, unrecognized by elites.
It’s interesting that a book like this might not be considered as “serious” history as something written by an academic historian. A great deal of what Perlstein is doing is laying down a record of what happened, with incredible detail, sourcing, and quotes: that’s why the book is 900 pages. An academic book would probably be shorter and less about documenting history than advancing an argument. I am more impressed by this type of writing.
In all, a worthwhile read, although nowhere near as gripping as Nixonland. Goldwater is an interesting figure, but not that interesting. The long middle part drags and only comes alive again when we start seeing more of LBJ’s insane-Texan thing. All this makes the length tough to stomach.