Customer Reviews

Inherent Vice

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4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

4.5 out of 5: Cloaked as a detective thriller, Inherent Vice contains the snappy dialog, complicated plot, and criminal underworld types typical of the genre. Don't be fooled by the packaging, though. This novel is pure everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Pynchon with satirical song lyrics, paranoia, drugs, pop culture, lawyers, sex, politics, zombies, more drugs, and a side-trip to Vegas. The neat resolution of a convoluted plot is not really the point. Instead, let go of your need for closure and join Pynchon for a buoyant romp through the psychedelic haze that was L.A. in the late 1960s.

Doc, an amiable, drug-addled personal investigator, stumbles onto a vicious international crime ring as he works on a case brought to him by his ex-girlfriend. By turns brilliant and bumbling, Doc exudes a kind of humble innocence and is the likeable center of this novel. He's both trustworthy and trustful and never far from questioning his own abilities and actions ("Did I say that outloud?"). In a typical example of the endearing workings of Doc's logic, he tries to deduce the origin of a postcard he receives "from some island he had never heard of out in the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of vowels in its name":

"The cancellation was in French and initialed by a local postmaster, along with the notation courrier par lance-coco which as close as he could figure from the Petit Larousse must mean some kind of catapult mail delivery involving coconut shells, maybe as a way of dealing with an unapproachable reef."

In Doc's world, postcards delivered via coconut catapults make perfect sense.

Clearly, Pynchon is having fun with the detective genre. In one scene, Doc drives to a mansion protected by a moat with a drawbridge. After the drawbridge descends "rumbling and creaking," "the night was very quiet again--not even the distant freeway traffic could be heard, or the footpads of coyotes, or the slither of snakes." Beneath all the humor and satire, there's a darker message here. The fun is almost over for Doc and his fellow hippies as paranoia, the harbinger of future oppression, overtakes the fun-loving sixties "like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day."

At times Inherent Vice is overly constrained by its purported genre as Pynchon weaves together the complicated plotlines of a detective story, maintaining too tight a grasp on a linear reality. The excessive plotting hampers some of the book's whimsical exuberance. But, unlike much of Pynchon's previous work, Inherent Vice is eminently readable and even, at times, actually suspenseful. At under 400 pages, Inherent Vice is also one of Pynchon's shortest novels. If you've been too intimidated to attempt a Pynchon novel up to now, try this one.

As many have already written, Thomas Pynchon is an acquired taste, like jazz and silent comedy (two other tastes I have joyfully acquired). I first tasted Pynchon, like most readers my age, in his debut novel, "V." Somewhere between the silliness of the "whole sick crew" and the all-too-seriousness of Stencil's Oedipal search, I realized I was reading someone who was a literary personification of a Jerry Garcia dictum: "It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You have to be the only one to do what you do." I was (am) hooked.

Not that Pynchon hasn't let me down. I did not like "Against the Day" after page 250 or so (or once we left the Colorado miners behind), and "Vineland," I thought, was a bad joke. "Gravity's Rainbow" is probably still his best, but for warmth and humanity, "Mason & Dixon" tops it. Many reviewers are already referring to his new book, "Inherent Vice," as his warmest, but I still vote for Charles & Jeremiah.

What "Inherent Vice" is, is a wonderful joyride. It probably doesn't hurt that I was an idealistic hippie in the spring of 1970, somewhat younger than protagonist Doc Sportello, but just as disgusted with what Pynchon calls "flatland." There are the usual Pynchon foibles - too many stupid names, too much loveless sex, too many bad punchlines. But there is something so easy about reading it - and that is certainly unusual for Pynchon. I'm not sure if all readers will have as easy a time as a Pynchon devotee like me, but I don't see how this novel could present any real difficulties. Just remember that plot continuity is not really all that important in any PI novel. Raymond Chandler agrees with me on that last point, and Pynchon is obviously lovingly parodying Chandler and Hammett in "Inherent Vice."

The greatest element of the novel is the aforementioned Doc Sportello, who, although referred to in the third person, is the narrative point of view through which the tale is told. We see all of Gordita Beach and Greater Los Angeles through his pot-clouded senses. Doc shares something with all of the great detectives of the genre like Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Hammett's Continental Op -a code of honor. In Doc's case, he is loyal to the hippie subculture that is trying to eke out an existence by the waves instead of joining the decrepit and meaningless straight world. As one character puts it, the tug is between the hippie lifestyle of "freedom" vs. "that endless middle class cycle of choices that are no choices at all." Doc sees that his and his friends' way of life has a short expiration label, but he does everything in his power to keep it running as long as it can. And, of course, in the spring of 1970 in L.A., it was running out quickly, what with Manson and his family, who are eerily in the background throughout the novel.

I won't give anything away. I will tell you that Pynchon's novel, if not his warmest, is definitely his most comic. I mentioned earler that there are too many flat punchlines. Did I mention that there are hundreds of good ones?

Michael Santa Maria

Those that know, know the writing of Thomas Pynchon can be a rough row to hoe--featuring convoluted, paranoid plotting, byzantine sentence structure, alternation of genres and modes of presentation within a single opus--sometimes even a single page--funny names and multi-layered puns, revisionist history and anachronisms galore. And pizza--plenty of pizza. What most folks who've read Pynchon expect is a rough but rewarding time decrypting encoded messages pointing to vast conspiracies both right and left, and being able to pat themselves on the back for being so wickedly erudite as to be able to follow at least some of the multiple, overlapping plotlines found within each of his six novels. Those that don't know Thomas Pynchon usually bail out on page 150 of Gravity's Rainbow.

But note this down and burn this deep into your collective forebrains--Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon's seventh and funniest novel, is a beach read.

The grand master of literary obfuscation actually did it this time--either he made a conscious decision to express himself via comparatively stable characters and plotline of a more traditional make & model or he said "screw it--it's time to cash in!" Inherent Vice has sentence structures and vocabulary more akin to Tom Robbins than Henry James, an overall shape more like Christopher Buckley than Henry Adams. You'll knock this one back like chugging down a Corona during a Fresno mid-summer heat-wave. Inherent Vice is cool and refreshing and funnier and easier to comprehend than anything else Pynchon's written so far.

And yes folks, in spite of various smack-downs from some of the more self-conscious members of the professional lit-crit establishment, Inherent Vice has meaningful connections to Pynchon's larger collection of cabals and conspiracies including a lot of what appears to be the author's personal back story. There is a major element of autobiography to this novel, a Palimpsest buried in so deep that it's more like a solid concrete foundation--you'll need some heavy-duty construction equipment to work your way through it. Once I opened the book I knew that this stuff had to be ripped from the tattered casebook of Thomas Pynchon, professional cryptic `n sleuth--from cloak and dagger to croak and stagger!!! I was seeing where stuff in Gravity's Rainbow could have come from--what lunch might be like Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling, places where you'll find boysenberry yogurt and marshmallows on your pizza --or a joint along with your hamburger available during Tommy's Hamburger's 2-4-1 special. No fear dude, this little pamphlet will be plenty re-readable, with loads of evidence of mindless pleasures to unearth as you dig through the narrative rubble.

While many readers of Inherent Vice will note the resonances to The Big Lebowski, & some to the Robert Altman/Elliott Gould "Long Goodbye"--fewer still recalling "Nick Danger, Third Eye" and an even more miniscule slice of that demographic recalling Bonzo Dog Band's "Big Shot"--the key element connecting all these works is Raymond Chandler. If any writing of the last 100 years deserves James Wood's Lit-Crit damning-with-faint-praise pejorative "Hysterical Realism," it's Chandler's Noir with Literary Pretensions. The Firesigns, the Coens and Altman 'n Gould were all making variations, comments and carom shots off of Chandler's high-gloss pulp. As does Pynchon. The nominal Dame of these stories, usually a lady who's doing her best to reinvent herself with a different haircut, clothes, identity, address--is THE figure at the core of Noir.

In Inherent Vice, that "Dame" is Shasta, ex-girlfriend of hazy P.I. and protagonist Doc Sportello--a L.A. beauty queen who wanted to make it big in the movies but settled for money from her rich, married-to-someone-else real-estate-mogul boyfriend, Mickey Wolfman. Wolfman has been kidnapped in the immediate wake of the Tate-LaBianca Murders, leading to many a nervous mishap among hypersensitive members of the L.A.P.D. Naturally, as in Raymond Chandler's Pulp Fictions, things get really complicated real fast and the rot leads all the way to the top of L.A.'s food chain. The symbolism of Shasta can be spotted by anyone who knows what Pynchon was writing about in Vineland. By the time you've zipped through Inherent Vice's 369 pages, you'll probably want to start all over again to figure out what you missed. The name on the cover changes nothing, this is still a beach read.

Who'd 'a thunk it?

I can do no better than to quote Mark Twain (from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn):"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Okay, to be fair, the plot is relatively simple for a Pynchon book: Private investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello becomes involved with various disappearances and homicides in late '60s Southern California, and manages to survive and actually successfully solve (at least some of) the mysteries while maintaining a pretty consistent buzz.

Never having subscribed to the Pynchon cult, it's relatively easy for me to take his books at face value. I read Gravity's Rainbow a couple of times, but when I picked it up recently I couldn't manage to take it as seriously as I did in 1975. V was good fun, but I haven't felt the need to reread it. Mason and Dixon was okay for about 3/4 of the way, but eventually became bogged down in its own silliness and fantasy. Against the Day has several good books in it, but it's much less than the sum of those parts--perhaps Pynchon really was just playing a cosmic spoof on all of us....I could never decide whether I disliked Pynchon because I resented his tendency to show off and rub in it, or whether I felt inadequate to the task of reading a book by someone so obviously smarter than I.

Vineland was--until now--the only book of Pynchon's that merits reading for more than just the desire to finally get it over with. It possesses wit, characters that seem to have a reason to exist outside the requirements of the narrative, and a resolution beyond some fabulously complex intellectual exercise that you're not sure you completely understood. One obvious advantage of Vineland over its siblings is its manageable length; above all else, though, it was actually fun to read.

Well, Inherent Vice is actually fun to read, too. It obviously helps if you're a baby boomer and can get the pop-cultural references, or if you're into 40s-50s noir; but I think it can work for just about anyone who can imagine a drug-drenched sub-culture in which a relatively decent guy tries to carry on his work as a PI while trying to continue to live his druggie lifestyle more or less uninterrupted.

Unlike a professional reviewer, I won't summarize the plot to prove that I actually read the book. Suffice it to say that, if there is a serious intention here, it probably doesn't matter, and if there isn't, the book is still very entertaining.

"It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt."

Imagine a surfer-noir novel set in L.A. and environs in the spring of 1970 by Thomas Pynchon. Could anything be better? Answer: Inherent Vice is better! It's everything you could imagine, and then some. Every sentence is hugely entertaining, sort of the way Cormac McCarthy is entertaining, and also P.G. Wodehous. You just relish the diction. The plot is pure Chandler in its schematics: that is, characters are multiplied unnecessarily all for the dazzling color they give to the story; plot trots behind trying to keep up and just about succeeds in catching every character before they hit the ground. As in Chandler the characters who matter sort of only slowly emerge from the carnival, some very late: but that's the point of a carnival. Everyone matters to some gum-shoe or -sandal: we're concerned here with the ones that Marlowe or Doc are concerned with.

And Pynchon is so different from the writers I've lately been thinking about, writers who narrate the experience of narration. Reading Pynchon is a little like reading Shakespeare or Hammett: I'm just a wide-eyed reader again, not a person figuring out the experience of writing this book. I mean I am that sort of audience too for fun TV and Elmore Leonard and Neal Stephenson, for example. I like being just that. But for TV or Elmore Leonard I like because I can just enjoy the easy enjoyment of the thing. Whereas Pynchon requires -- no he doesn't require, he REWARDS -- the same kind of concentration I give Woolf or Geoff Dyer: a lot of concentration. But there's something wonderful about not concentrating on the experience of the book as an act of writing. You just concentrate for your own pleasure. And, man, he writes a good last line.

It's not that Pynchon as writer isn't an issue in the book. He is. But he's astonishingly good natured as a writer. What other real writers are? I can't think of any, not even Fielding.

Anyhow the first half of the book (when it's explaining something) repeats very occasionally -- sparsely even -- and very hauntingly two versions of the same phrase: "in those days"; "at that time." This plus a reference to Vineland as a place, plus one bracketed movie date at the end, are the only authorial self-references, the only sense that you have that an author is telling this to the reader instead of the voice coming off the page as part of the laid-back generosity of the narrative atmosphere. I love those phrases. They disappear from the second half, which is part of the very sadness the book's about: the end of an era, with Manson & Nixon (Doc must be called Doc partly as a descendent of Mason's, one of whose sons is called Doctor Isaac.)

Doc is slightly younger than Pynchon himself, pushing thirty in 1970, as we learn in a great, casually sad passage:

"Plastic trikes in the yards, people out watering the flowers and working on their cars, kids in the driveways shooting hoops, the high-frequency squeal of a TV sweep circuit through a screen door as Doc came up the path of the address he was looking for, to be followed by the more worldly sound, as he reached the front steps, of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. According to Fritz, the sweep frequency was 15,750 cycles per second, and the instant Doc turned thirty, which would be any minute now, he would no longer be able to hear it. So this routine of American house approach had begun to hold for him a particular sadness." (P. 199)

Yes, I remember that routine. I thought TV's didn't do that anymore. But they do. Pynchon remembers this sound, which he can no longer hear, from forty-two years ago, when he reached the untrustworthy age of 30.

And yet the novel is entirely without self-pity, which might be why some of the smartest people I know don't like Doc much as a character: he's not made for pity: the book doesn't pity him either, it just lovingly recreates "those days," "that time" ("That time, O times!" as Cleopatra says) -- a time of endless betrayal as all times are for Pynchon, but a time when there were so many people to betray. The stoned hippie belief in innocence is ridiculous and yet something to cherish. Doc is cynical as all get-out, but still cherishes it, which means he's part of the innocence he's cynical about. He gets all this and still likes his world. You don't think people can really be like that? Pynchon is.

On the one hand, I pretty much loved Inherent Vice from start to finish. It's funny--probably funnier than any other Pynchon. Doc Sportello is a great character. The period detail is extraordinarily vivid, in spite of occasional bits of anachronism (you can't have a Cheech and Chong reference in a novel that takes place in early 1970 (which we know it does by a reference to the NBA finals)--d'oh). This is one instance in which you really CAN judge a book by its cover--the garish neon lettering and utopian surfer aesthetic pretty much say it all.

On the other hand, I can't help--huh. It appears that the other hand is passing me a joint. Far be it from me to eff up the rotation, so I'll just have a toke, pass it on, and leave it at that. Ah.

What I was possibly going to say but now think doesn't need to be said is that the book seems a little light by Pynchon standards. All the usual motifs are here--paranoia, red-herringy digressions, whimsical character names, song lyrics arbitrarily inserted into the text--but it is certainly the case that Inherent Vice is more plot-driven than any of the man's previous novels. Which is to say that the pleasure of reading it derives more from the story itself and less from studying it for Meaning.

But there are two points to be made in response to that.

Point one: so what? After the incredible weightiness of Against the Day, why SHOULDN'T he relax a little? Do something just for fun? Sheesh, how demanding AM I?

Point two: While admitting the novel's comparative lightness, let's not overstate things. There's still lots to think about here, and no doubt more that will become apparent on second reading. It should be pretty immediately obvious that Pynchon is in part riffing on the same themes as Vineland does (there are a few unobtrusive references to the earlier novel, as well as a few minor common characters--whee!): the apparently limitless utopian possibilities of the sixties, squandered, lost, and replaced by the stultifying, conformist, authoritarian materialism of the eighties. Doc has periodic intimations throughout the novel that something's got to give. While this might not be a book to launch a thousand dissertations, it's plenty smart in its own right, and it is to Pynchon's credit that he was able to so effectively write a novel in a previously unfamiliar idiom and make it totally Pynchonian (though I guess after Mason & Dixon, this shouldn't surprise us, right?).

One might suggest that this novel might draw in a fair number of Pynchon newbies (who might then be badly poleaxed by Gravity's Rainbow), but I'm not sure whether or not that's a true statement. It's definitely his most accessible novel, but the fact remains that a lot of the pleasure in reading it, for a confirmed cultist like me, comes from reveling in the ineffable Pynchoness of it all. I'm not quite solipsistic enough to imagine that a person lacking the background to recognize this aura would necessarily find it similarly compelling. What I'm trying to say is, who knows if this review will be of any use to you whatsoever? However, the trend of me loving every Pynchon novel continues. If I say that I hope the next one (yes! I'm being optimistic! Hey, it worked last time, didn't it?) is a little heavier, that should in no way be taken as a slight against Inherent Vice, which I heartily recommend to you.

I always used to think of "The Crying of Lot 49" as the obvious entry point to the work of my favorite author. It may have had some dense prose, but at least it was short.
A new portal has been opened.
"Inherent Vice" is both short and easy to read, but it's still recognizably the work of Thomas Pynchon even if the pink flaps of the dustjacket are visually jarring as you read the remarkably unconvoluted sentences and short paragraphs. Despite the surprisingly atypical cover ("Mason & Dixon" and "Against the Day" appear so large and beige and sober on my bookshelves), pot-smoking private eye Doc Sportello would have felt at home wandering through any other book in the canon. I'm hoping that some new readers will pick up this quick marijuana-fueled trip through 1970 Los Angeles (a place where Pynchon seems very comfortable) and move on to the harder stuff, especially "Gravity's Rainbow," which may now seem much less daunting than its reputation. (I can't help thinking about James Joyce. How much less intimidating would his comic masterpiece "Ulysses" have seemed to many readers today if Joyce had ended his career with a simple thriller set in Dublin rather than with "Finnegans Wake"?)

This is no more a mystery novel than any of Pynchon's other novels are mysteries. Although the protagonist is a private eye, he is no more on a quest than are Oedipa Maas, Herbert Stencil, Tyrone Slothrop, or Mason & Dixon. Some readers think of this present Pynchonian installment as hard-boiled, a characteristic that is associated with the mystery genre, but there is also another possible interpretation: Rather than hard-boiled, the style is meant to describe a mean and desolate civilization, one completely void of compassion, of human warmth, or, for that matter, human contact. Characters who are not drugged, are caught up in pointless pop culture. If there is indeed a mystery to be solved, few are coherent enough to care. If some care, few are articulate enough to express this, even to themselves. As we make our way through Pynchon's fictions, from the renaissance of Mason & Dixon through the turn of the twentieth century of V. and Against the Day, and to the World War II of Gravity's Rainbow and the 60s of Lot 49, perhaps we can sense the beginnings of the coldness that comes to dominate Inherent Vice. In any case, if this book is a comedy, it is not playful. It may be Pynchon's most realistic story to-date.

I liked this better than anything Pynchon's written since Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's not much of a novelist in the classic sense: his plots are byzantine rambling wrecks in which loose ends are never tied up; his women are all "sexy chicks" or older female relatives; you can barely tell his characters apart if they talk for more than a couple sentences, because they all sound like Thomas Pynchon, and they certainly don't motivate his plots. But who cares? Not me, because he's the epic poet of our disintegrating age.
In Inherent Vice, Pynchon waxes nostalgic for the lost era when some of us thought that, given enough LSD, we could save our greedy real estate crazed violent society from itself. The vehicle for expressing this nostalgia is Doc Sportello, a pot-head detective who tries to stay groovy with everything, and my favorite of all Pynchon's characters, perhaps because he's more like Pynchon than any of the others, so hearing Pynchon's thoughts in Sportello's brain seems natural.
Perhaps due to age, Pynchon's gotten a bit careless about detail, or maybe I just didn't know enough about WWII to notice the time slips in Gravity's Rainbow. According to the Wiki commentary, the novel takes place between March 24th and May 8th, 1970, but during the present tense time of the narration, Lew Alcindor has already changed his name to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, which didn't happen until 1971, and the Manson trial, which didn't start until June 15th, 1970, is taking or has just taken place. Maybe it's all that pot Sportello's been smoking that keeps him from being firmly anchored in time, or maybe Pynchon was in too big a hurry to do the research needed to pin all the novel's events down firmly to one consistent time line. I've said it once, and have to say it again. Who cares when Pynchon's endlessly original and evocative poetry tumbles out of almost every page? This is a novel that's making me re-think my abhorrence of "language" literature. Most novelists can't pull it off, but in Pynchon's case, his voice is almost (except in the case of Mason & Dixon) enough.

I don't remember how I first learned about Thomas Pynchon. I think... Crying of Lot 49 was assigned in a survey course during under graduate? Or my writing professor, Charles Larson, had us read it. Since then I've read every one of Pynchon's book's except "Slow Learner." For those inclined towards hagiography, Pynchon is one of my saints. In his writing, I see the world. He is the arch druid of literary paranoia, of conspiracy; more then DeLillo, His influence marks the work of contemporary writers: Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Eggers. Pynchon's literary is like the world today: sprawling, complicated, surreal, obtuse. He was a sage of maximalism.
The term maximalism is sometimes associated with post-modern novels, such as by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. This sort of literature is also frequently described as hysterical realism, a term coined by James Wood, who argues that it is a genre similar to magical realism. (WIKI)
I'd think you'd have to add William Vollmann into any discussion if Maximalism.


I would dispute that Maximalism, as expressed in literature, is in any way "post" modern. It is quite transparently a modern project to be Maximalist. I would like to take this opportunity to formally pledge allegiance to the Maximalist literary project, however that may be defined. Maximalism is modern, not post-modern. Have I ever told you how I hate New Yorker's short stories? Odd, but true.


Inherent Vice is Pynchon's latest book. It's a detective novel, as recognizable in terms of genre fiction as a classic Raymond Chandler book. Pynchon's private dick (a joke that Pynchon lovvvveeesssss to make in Inherent Vice) is a dope smoking Venice (well Gordita) Beach dwelling private eye, as familiar to your parents (The Maltese Falcon) as you (The Big Lebowski). I don't think that it stretches anyone's mind to posit the detective novel as a primary literary form. It exists both as a consistent earner on the best seller list, an inspiration for bad sounding HBO tv shows, and an endless source of metaphor for lazy writers. So to read Inherent Vice is basically to ask "Why this book? Why now?" As with every other question about Pynchon, there are literally no answers, since Pynchon does not give interviews or make public appearances of any kind.


I suspect that the debate over Inherent Vice is likely to be whether it belongs in Pynchon's canon (alongside Crying of Lot 49, which is also short and readable by a normal joe) or whether it is the work of a writer in his dotage. I have to say that I'm way in the "Canon/Major Work" category because Inherent Vice has all the Pynchonian touches that you expect: dope smoking, warner brothers cartoon references, convoluted plot points, great character names, etc. AND it's only 350 pages long AND it's set in the Los Angeles area so it's easier to get all the pop cultural reference points.


I experienced a deep feeling of joy while reading Inherent Vice. I recommend it both to Pynchon fans and detective novel fans alike- make sure to get the hard cover with the cool hippie-woodie on the front. This is not a boring read- the main character smokes weed on almost every page (in Pynchonian terms, weed smoking becomes almost magical), there is plenty of sex, lewd jokes and toilet humor. We're talking pop culture level material, here. Stuff that wouldn't be out of place in said HBO television show mentioned above, necessarily. The jargon/dialect/slang- in this case southern California surf community talk, is a native dialect for me, so I really dug the language play this time around (unlike other Pynchon novels where it was a bit of a chore to wade through.)


Did you know the Radiohead listserve "WASTE" is a Pynchon reference? True.