VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables (Edward Mendelson, "Levity's Rainbow")

[Terrance]

The more the melodramatic language of Vineland casts Brock
  Vond as a sadistic villain, the more the logic of the action
  casts him as a partner in a dance of mutual courtship. Some
  readers, taking the tone for the substance, have complained
  that Brock and the other Justice Department heavies in
  Vineland seem disappointingly tame when compared with the
  real heavies who occupied the department under Nixon and
  Reagan.

  But like all literature that tries to make a moral argument,
  Vineland sees little point in placing blame on 
  those who are unlikely ever to
  read it. It tries to discomfort its readers, 
  first by agreeing with their
  self-satisfied sense that their unhappiness is the result of
  others'actions, then by quietly demonstrating that the
  actions that most afflict them are their own. The 1960s
  radicals (and the peaceful apolitical potsmokers whom
  Pynchon treats with sentimental affection)
  do not even have the satisfaction of defeating Brock Vond,
  who is defeated by his own side. Ronald Reagan, like a
  half-conscious deus ex machina, wakes from a dream and, by
  cutting Vond's budget, interrupts him in mid-villainy. 


  In these final chapters all the book's generations of the
  living gather for another reunion, one that joins the
  families of Frenesi Gates'sgrandparents. The older members
  of these two families are Wobblies and Hollywood
  left-wingers, bearers of a heritage
  of an alternate and unofficial America. Pynchon treats this
  alternate tradition as a matriarchal one: the novel traces
  the ancestry of all its women characters while treating the
  men as if they sprang directly from the earth. Frenesi's
  hatred for her newborn daughter, 
  and voluntary separation from her soon
  afterward, violates that
  matriarchal line, just as her murderous entanglement with
  Brock Vond is a sign of what the book's historical myth
  regards as the betrayal of the true alternate America by the
  1960s left.  After so thorough a betrayal no return or
  recovery can ever be complete. 

Edward Mendelson, "Levity's Rainbow," in The New Republic,
  Vol. 203,  Nos. 2 & 3, July 9 & 16, 1990, pp. 40-6.