I am perhaps the odd person here in that I'd never gotten around to reading Pynchon until Inherent Vice. So, I can't say much about how it relates to the rest of his canon. That's a canon, though, that I soon hope to explore after reading this novel. Having finished it and digested it for about a week, I've come to the conclusion that Inherent Vice is just a startling book, one of the best novels I've read in years.
There's so much to say about it, but I'll just highlight two key reasons for why I loved it. First, it is a fun read. A lot of reviewers have described Inherent Vice as a beach read because of its ubiquitous humor, the vibrant rhythm of the dialogue and storytelling, the nostalgic feel of 1960s California, a likeable and mysterious central character (Doc), and a loose but amusing plot centered around a hippy detective's quest to solve a case (that's not even the case he starts out investigating). It does possess all of those aspects. That said, I wouldn't call it a beach read. I'd think you might call it a beach read if you've only been reading Pynchon's previous novels and the like. But the novel's too philosophical, it frustrates the conventions of the detective genre too much, and its plot is hardly coherent and easily grasped--it's just not a beach read. But all of those entertaining qualities are still present. What it is is a fun *and* literary read. I just think people are a little shocked at those two qualities being combined for once.
Second, the more I think about the novel, the more I think that it has a sad and beautiful thematic center. One aspect of the plot concerns the character Coy Harlingen and his family. Coy and his wife Hope had been heroine addicts unable to keep from destroying their own lives and the life of their daughter Amethyst. I won't give away any details, but Coy has been estranged from the family (in a way that helped Hope to get clean and set up a more solid livelihood for Amethyst), leaving them saddened with only some pictures to remember him by. At some point, Doc thinks of Amethyst and thinks that she "deserves something more than faded polaroids to go to when she gets the little-kid blues." Doc sets out to find Coy.
I think that image sums up a lot of what's going on in the novel. There's a hard hitting critique of our late capitalist American culture that we have traded the image for the thing. Somehow, we've lost our ability to connect to the world (it's a shifting, decaying natural world in the novel), to others, and to our most natural desires. We've lost sense of the real. And so we face a future in which authentic livelihoods can barely be remembered and can hardly be accessed... The novel attempts to articulate something of that loss and to look for a way out of the fog...
It's a fun read. But don't think it's just a fun read.
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intelligent bozoism
Childish, ham-fisted, often annoying, every bit as cliche as any noir novel except w/a resolution even more preposterous than most by several magnitude, more a parroting of the genre than a parody, but worth reading if only so you can say that you've read Pynchon w/o having to wade through something like Mason & Dixon.
Top reviews from other countries
Casper
A vivid trip, but not necessarily a great one
Reviewed in the Netherlands on June 22, 2023Francesco von Rom
valutazione inherent vice romanzo
Reviewed in Italy on April 15, 2019
