I slogged through Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) over the past couple of weeks.
Vineland is about systematic repression – of unions, of the revolutionary spirit of the psychadelic 60s, even of law enforcement itself as the Hoover-Nixon heyday of the 70s gave way to fiscal austerity in Reagan’s 80s. After reading it, I think I understand better what it might have felt like to live through the end of the dream of the 60s.