Vineland.

DON'T MIND admitting that I was one of those long-suffering readers who eagerly awaited Thomas Pynchon's new novel. Gravity's now, Pynchon's 1973 epic, was a daunting, compelling work, full of lapel-clutching intimidation, lapinfrom-chapeau hocus-pocus, and fascinating tonal leap froggings-a Nazi opera conducted by Spike Jones. It had a tension that justified the fantasy. Which is precisely what Vineland, the product of 17 years' labor, does not have. The new book is a bore and a chore, and, given all the anticipation, may rank as the literary disappointment of the decade.

It is supposed to be a vision of America, a drugged comedy of lost souls. Trouble is, Pynchon-unlike Nolan Ryan-has lost the zip on his fastball: scenes fall flat, characters are without interest, jokes are stale, conflations are mechanical, and his ideas are left brain-dead through a bludgeoning repetition.

The story hits so many false notes that it's embarrassing and exasperating to recite them. A fearsome federal narc, Brock Vond, controls a mystery woman, Frenesi Gates. In a Steven Spielberg ripoff, Brock is dematerialized. Good riddance. Slowly, we discover that Frenesi is a non-entity. Who cares?

The mixture of "fact" and fantasy is no blend, for each discredits the other. The fantasy isn't fantastic, and the history is insistently ideological. Sure, Pynchon is Pynchon, so there are some good sequences. I relished his most idiosyncratic ploy: the pronounced caesurae and exclamatory repetitiveness in the voice of one Takeshi Fumimota are sly parodies of the dubbed English of Godzilla and Rodan. "It's going to take a while . . . to get to the bottom of this!" "Think we can get . . . Singapore Slings?" It's fine ventriloquism, but insufficiently buoyant to save a sinking novel.

The voices of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon are prominently and frequently employed, as three generations of left-wing cliches are trotted out in an endless procession. The Californication of Amerika ! Pynchon's favorite word is "paranoia." He seems to use it whenever he wants to distance himself from the extravagances of fellow travelers, dopeheads, hippies, and other strange bedfellows, but rhetoric betrays him. His politics and theology are those of the preterist and the professional victim. There is feminist jargon. There is socialist blather. He swings wildly, but never lands a glove, and it's because he's in a clinch with sentimentality the feinting alter ego of his icy alienation.

The only really interesting thing about Vineland is its success, both critical and popular. Critical puffery you can attribute to admiration of the book's polities. Retail sales are harder to figure, since so little pleasure or intellectual profit is to be derived from reading Vineland.