Film critic Terrence Rafferty admired the novel, and in "The New Yorker" called it "the oldest story in the world—the original sin and the exile from Paradise," but author Sean Carswell later contended that aside from Rafferty and Rushdie, initial reviews of "Vineland" "run the gamut from slightly miffed to outright hostile." Edward Mendelson's review in "The New Republic" was mostly positive, however; although he found the plot to be tangled and tedious, he praised Pynchon's "intellectual and imaginative energy" and called the work "a visionary tale" whose world was "richer and more various than the world of almost any American novel in recent memory." He also commended the book's "comic extravagance," claiming that "no other American writer moves so smoothly and swiftly between the extremes of high and low style."