SOURCE: "State and Vine," in Yale Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 690-8.

In the following review, Powers offers a positive evaluation of Vineland.

A Corporate State, as the quickest study among slow learners long ago pointed out, knows how to turn even innocence to its many uses. Childhood, vulnerability, every fairy tale that ever soothed us to sleep will, along with the rest of individual experience, be exploited, interrogated, made to turn a profit, put to efficacious and pacifying work by the controlling powers. Such a nightmarish historical motion pervades Gravity's Rainbow, one of the most astonishing and urgent American novels ever written. Politics, that exhaustive, eschatological proverb for paranoids sez, advances inexorably on the moment when the State will achieve its program, when government will at last seal off and package innocence, gaining a legislative stranglehold on pleasure. Pynchon's first novel in the seventeen years since Gravity's...