Mendelson additionally noted that "Vineland" was more integrated with its emotions and feelings than Pynchon's previous novels, and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the "Chicago Reader" that it was the author's most hopeful work yet. That hopefulness was also mentioned by Rushdie, who believed that the book suggested community, individuality, and family as counterweights to the repressive Nixon-Reagan era, but Dan Geddes opined in 2005 in "The Satirist" that the book's "happy ending" was surprising, given its overarching warning about a growing police state. Contrarily, Rushdie found that the shocking final scene lent itself to a morally ambiguous ending, and he felt that the novel expertly held a balance between light and dark throughout its entire duration.