Family dinners are exhausting opportunities to rehearse the major fault lines in mainstream American politics. If Vineland is supposed to be a microcosm of the United States in 2016, then the house is an excuse for Kingsolver to cram five people with disparate political allegiances under one leaky roof. Young mothers pass her on the sidewalk “conversing in a musical Asian language.” Her daily walk takes her past “a pawn shop, the welfare office, a Thai restaurant, and the Number One Chinese Market.” She thinks that if she had to pitch an article about the town, its headline would read: “Nineteenth-Century Utopias Gone to Hell.” Family dinners are exhausting opportunities to rehearse the major fault lines in mainstream American politics. When she glances at the yard of her neighbor Jorge, she sees a “vehicle boneyard” and hears “intermittent Spanish expletives of frustration or success” as the boys next door tinker with abandoned cars. The Knox-Tavoularis family has since inherited the house, and Willa sees signs of Vineland’s decline everywhere. An (actual) old Temperance town whose soil once made it attractive to glassmakers and chicken farmers and the founders of Welch’s Grape Juice, Vineland lost its raison d’être after a line of pesticide manufacturers poisoned the land and fled, along with many of the town’s jobs and a noticeable portion of its white people.
The novel, Kingsolver’s eighth, chronicles Willa’s attempt to save her dead aunt’s house, a crumbling Victorian mansion in Vineland, New Jersey.
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