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Inherent Vice Hardcover – August 4, 2009

4.3 out of 5 stars 896 ratings

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The Amazon Book Review
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Pynchon flashes the Sixties rock references faster than a Ten Years After guitar solo: His characters walk around wearing T-shirts from Pearls Before Swine, name-drop the Electric Prunes, turn up the Stones' 'Something Happened to Me Yesterday' on the radio. (I had never heard of Bonzo Dog Band's "Bang Bang" before, but it's on my iPod now.) The rock & roll fanboy love on every page is a feast for Pynchon obsessives, since we've always wondered what the man listens to….The songs are fragments in the elegiac tapestry for the Sixties, an era full of hippie slobs who just wanted to be left alone and so accidentally backed into heroic flights of revolutionary imagination. Can you dig it?" --Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone

Amazon Exclusive: Thomas Pynchon's Soundtrack to Inherent Vice

Larry "Doc" Sportello is a private eye who sees the world through a sticky dope haze, animated by the music of an era whose hallmarks were peace, love, and revolution. As Doc's strange case grows stranger, his 60s soundtrack--ranging from surf pop and psychedelic rock to eerie instrumentals--picks up pace. Have a listen to some of the songs you'll hear in
Inherent Vice—the playlist that follows is designed exclusively for Amazon.com, courtesy of Thomas Pynchon. (Links will take you to individual MP3 downloads, full albums, or artist pages.)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry Doc Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. We're in early-'70s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon's recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away. It all starts with Pynchon's least conspicuous intro ever: She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to—she being Doc's old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big's strings is always a villain even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon's unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard's exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there's a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly suggestive setting, the novel's bones need only a touch of the screenwriter's dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American literature's most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable. Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon's developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition—yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he's more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity's Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1594202249
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition (August 4, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781594202247
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594202247
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.42 x 1.25 x 9.68 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 896 ratings

About the author

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Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937. His books include The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
896 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

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Top reviews from other countries

Hungry Sam
2.0 out of 5 stars Inscrutable and overrated
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2021
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Mr Peter C Doherty
5.0 out of 5 stars unbelievable
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2022
C. Vaughan
5.0 out of 5 stars Profound pop
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2018
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Robert Blythe
5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting and nostalgic!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2018
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bridget
5.0 out of 5 stars Really good. Better than the film
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 5, 2017
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