Salman Rushdie: Still Crazy After All Those Years

Review of Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland", The New York Times, January 14, 1990

But what is perhaps most interesting, finally, about Mr. Pynchon's new novel is what is different about it. What is interesting is the willingness with which he addresses, directly, the political development of the United States, and the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition many generations and decades older than flower power. There is a marvelously telling moment when Brock Vond's brainchild, his school for subversion in which lefties are re-educated and turned into tools of the state, is closed down because in Reagan's America the young think like that to begin with, they don't need re-education.

What is interesting is to have before us, at the end of the Greed Decade, that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years. And as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly. And most interesting of all this is that aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and individuality, and family. These are the values the Nixon-Reagan era stole from the 60's and warped, aiming them back at America as weapons of control. They are values that Vineland seeks to recapture, by remembering what they meant before the dirt got thrown all over them, by recalling the beauty of Frenesi Gates before she turned.

Thomas Pynchon is no sentimentalist, however, and the balance between light and dark is expertly held throughout this novel, so that we remain uncertain until the final pages as to which will prevail, hippie heaven or Federal nemesis. And we are left, at the last, with an image of such shockingly apt moral ambiguity that it would be quite wrong to reveal it here.