Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

The Barnes & Noble Review

If Thomas Pynchon were a stand-up comedian, and Inherent Vice his newest routine, the heckling would start around page 10. "So Doc," relates a character called Denis (whose name, we are informed, is commonly pronounced to rhyme with -- heh, heh -- "penis"), "I'm up on Dunecrest, you know the drugstore there, and like I noticed their sign, 'Drug'? 'Store'? Okay? Walked past it a thousand times, never really saw it -- Drug, Store! man, far out, so I went in and Smilin Steve was at the counter and I said, like, 'Yes, hi, I'd like some drugs, please...' "

Boo! Get off! I mean, obviously -- by way of mitigation -- the character in question is a typically Pynchon-esque hippie burnout, and obviously some brand of haute-Pynchonoid satire is being enacted here upon the concept of, you know, "signs." But the fact remains: the drugstore/drugstore joke, qua joke, is an exhibition of stoner wit so feeble it would have been sent back by the writers of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and accepted only with some demurral by Cheech and Chong.

The '60s, of course, were a historic low point for humor. I mean humor of the sort enjoyed by people who aren't a) tenured or b) high, the sort defined by William James as "common sense, dancing." Categories, hierarchies, proprieties, the basic intuitions of mankind as to its own status and destiny -- those things on which humor has traditionally depended were suddenly up in the air, and while there was plenty of inane and liberated laughter to be heard, the sound of the authentic assenting chuckle, of the joke being solidly got, almost died away. Was everything meaningful, or nothing at all? Ah, that was the gag, the cosmic put-on, expressible only via cracked puns and the smirk of satori. Pynchon danced upon this pinhead with an insistent nimbleness: whose fictional world signified more compulsively and indiscriminately than his, the significance itself being quite beside the point? The quasi-allegorical names (Floyd Haruspex, Dichotomy Jones, Dr Whitewhale -- to make up a few in the Pynchonian vein), the veiled acronymic entities (WASTE, IGLOO) that might be gangs or priesthoods or think-tanks, the omnivore's digressions into science and pop culture, the fluorescent landscape, the sense of bottomless and undiscoverable conspiracy -- for a setup this elaborate, no earthly, or indeed celestial, punch line was possible.

With Inherent Vice Pynchon has returned to the territory of The Crying of Lot 49 -- which is to say, California in the late '60s. The Manson Family has just done their "thing," throwing a new shade of jitteriness (or "post-Mansonical nerves") into straight/hippie relations. Acid-gobbling Gordita Beach private dick Doc Sportello is trying to extricate his ex, the beautiful Shasta Fay, from a sketchy romantic embroilment with local real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, who has just disappeared, or been disappeared. The Aryan Brotherhood, on motorcyles, are making their presence felt, as is an ineffable organization called the Golden Fang. And the Feds, of course -- Special Agents Flatweed and Borderline -- are in attendance. Radio waves hum. Rudimentary computers are being used to collate data, combining with pandemic psychedelic telepathy to offer premonitory hints of a realm that may or may not, eventually, turn out to be cyberspatial: "I'm surfin' the wave of the future here," Doc's tech-geek pal tells him, "...I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange world -- time, space, all that shit."

One way to enjoy Inherent Vice might be to imagine it as the work, not of Thomas Pynchon, but of a tenacious coven of Pynchon devotees -- pranksterish post-Aquarian zanies who have the great man locked away somewhere and are writing the books they think he should write. They know his rhythms and his obsessions, the deep grooves of his mind; they have the style down. At this point, who can say, they might be doing Pynchon better than Pynchon himself. "A private eye didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops..." They know that no detail, however mundane, is to be denied its ration of underglow; even the parking laws in Gordita Beach have been "devised secretly by fiendish anarchists to infuriate drivers into one day forming a mob and attacking the offices of town government." We meet a British band called Spotted Dick, coiffured uniformly in "scissor-cut asymmetric bobs," and clackety-clack goes the fake authorial brain towards a classic Pynchon almost-joke: "Last week in fact the lead vocalist had decided to change his name legally to Asymmetric Bob, after his bathroom mirror revealed to him, three hours into a mushroom experiment, that there were actually two distinct sides to his face, expressing two violently different personalities." Trippy, yeah. Funny? Of course not.

A saner appreciation of this book, perhaps, would salute it as the work of a reclusive literary eminence, a septuagenarian by most accounts, who still writes with the spermatic fizz of a 25-year-old ginning up for his first book tour. The surfers off Gordita Beach go "on rides of five minutes and longer through seething tunnels of solar bluegreen, the true and unendurable color of daylight." Doc Sportello, after an inhalation of Asian indica, "prepared to be knocked on his ass but instead found a perimeter of clarity not too hard to stay inside of." This is bravura, look-at-me stuff, of a caliber to rival that other great California drug novel, Denis Johnson's Already Dead.

At such moments Inherent Vice seems to escape from the droning orbit of Pynchon-ness and into a freer imaginative space, into seething tunnels of solar bluegreen, even. But then the old gnostic vibration returns, the paranoid's gleam, the feeling that "the world had just been disassembled, anybody here could be working any hustle you could think of, and it was long past time to be, as Shaggy would say, like, gettin' out of here, Scoob." Amen, brother. --James Parker

James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press), and a correspondent for The Atlantic.

From the Publisher

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon- private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

The New York Times Book Review - Walter Kirn

Pynchon doesn't write plots; instead, he devises suggestive webs of circumstance whose meanings depend on the angles from which they're viewed and can seem ominous and banal by turns, like so many situations in life. In Pynchon, the problem of distinguishing between coincidences and conspiracies, between the prosaic and the profound, is one of the defining tasks of consciousness. For some, like Doc, whose cerebral equipment is particularly unreliable, this perennial mental challenge can prove insuperable, but that may be why Pynchon chose him for the job. His confusion is all of ours exaggerated, his paranoia a version of normal pattern-making amped way up by his intake of hallucinogens. That doesn't mean he's blind, though, or delusional. Hyper-awareness makes sense at times, especially when, as in 1970 (the year in which the book is set), the times are changing more rapidly than usual and were radically out of joint to start with.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Inherent Vice not only reminds us how rooted Mr. Pynchon's authorial vision is in the '60s and '70s, but it also demystifies his work, underscoring the similarities that his narratives—which mix high and low cultural allusions, silly pranks and gnomic historical references, mischievous puns, surreal dreamlike sequences and a playful sense of the absurd—share with the work of artists like Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and even Richard Brautigan.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

For more than 45 years, Thomas Pynchon has been the hidden god of modern letters, rarely photographed, never interviewed, but nonetheless revered and worshiped, his name pronounced by the devoted with a hiccup of pure awe: Thomas, gulp, Pynchon. Fans even collect the few books for which he has given a dust-jacket blurb. Every word of the Master is precious. Nonetheless, Pynchon has often been -- at least until "Inherent Vice" -- a writer more admired than loved. Such imposing epics as "Gravity's Rainbow," "Mason & Dixon" and the recent "Against the Day" daunt even the most rugged readers. Assaults on such Everests require not only the usual climbing gear -- pitons and belaying ropes and what all -- but also oxygen canisters and Sherpa guides, as well. These majestic works are more than worth the effort, but they aren't what most people would call page-turners or comfort books. Which is just what "Inherent Vice" is. Imagine the cult film "The Big Lebowski" as a novel, with touches of "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential" thrown in for good measure. Imagine your favorite Raymond Chandler or James Crumley mystery retold as a hippie whodunit, set in Gordita Beach, Calif., at the very end of the 1960s. Imagine a great American novelist, one who is now a septuagenarian, writing with all the vivacity and bounce of a young man who has just discovered girls. Most of all, imagine sentences and scenes that are so much fun to read that you wish "Inherent Vice" were twice as long as it is. Imagine saying that about a Thomas Pynchon novel....

"Inherent Vice" may not be the Great American Novel, but it's certainly a Great American Read -- a terrific pastiche of California noir, wonderfully amusing throughout (and hard to quote from in a family newspaper because of the frequent use of, uh, colorful spoken language) and a poignant evocation of the last flowering of the '60s, just before everything changed and passed into myth or memory: "Sunrise was on the way, the bars were just closed or closing, out in front of Wavos everybody was either at the tables along the sidewalk, sleeping with their heads on Health Waffles or in bowls of vegetarian chili, or being sick in the street, causing small-motorcycle traffic to skid in the vomit and so forth. It was late winter in Gordita."

Publishers Weekly

Pynchon's deceptively lighthearted stab at detective fiction is a lazy jog through the brambles of stoned late '60s Southern California, with a half-cocked private eye named Doc Sportello, who specializes more in meandering than actual investigating. Freaks and straights talk past each other, their meanings eluding all attempts at mutual comprehension, and Ron McLarty channels Doc's slurred mumble expertly and vividly brings to life the novel's sun-soaked, druggy ambience. A Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, July 22). (Aug.)

Entertainment Weekly

The new Pynchon: a beach read and a heartstring puller. It's almost surreal.

Chicago Tribune

How pitch-perfect noir can one get?

Los Angeles Times

Inherent Vice is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era's end. This, of course, is exactly the kind of layered meaning that readers expect of Pynchon . . . With Pynchon's brilliance comes readability.

Rolling Stone

Inherent Vice is the funniest book Pynchon has written. It's also a crazed and majestic summary of everything that makes him a uniquely huge American voice. It has the moral fury that's fueled his work from the start - his ferociously batshit compassion for America and the lost tribes who wander through it.

Newsweek

Pynchon's prose is so casually vernacular, so deeply in the American grain, you forget that someone composed it. Inherent Vice feels fizzily spontaneous-like a series of jazz solos, scenes, and conversations built around little riffs of language.

Donna Seaman - Booklist

"Did I say that out loud?" Doc Sportello asks. It's hard to keep things straight when you're high. Unlike his hard-core L.A. noir compatriots, this private eye's primary vice is pot, not booze. It's the roach-end of the 1960s, and the sole proprietor and employee of LSD Investigations (Location, Surveillance, Detection) uses the flair of his bellbottoms to conceal his gun and muses, "A private eye didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops." And doesn't he milk his spaced-out pothead persona for everything it's worth as he searches for missing construction mogul Mickey Wolfmann. Doc's haphazard (or is it?) investigation is complicated by his nemesis, a cop called Bigfoot Bjornsen; Doc's persistent feelings for his ex and affair with a district attorney; memory lapses; and hallucinations. Pynchon is frolicking in this psychedelic mystery, featuring dopers, surfers, bikers, predators, and parasites, drugs and counterfeit money, setups and switchbacks, and the Golden Fang, a stealth ship. As Doc wiggles and smokes his way out of gnarly predicaments, Pynchon skewers urban renewal, television, government surveillance, and the looming computer age. A bit of a mystery himself, master writer Pynchon has created a bawdy, hilarious, and compassionate electric-acid-noir satire spiked with passages of startling beauty. Starred Review.

Louis Menand - The New Yorker

Sportello is the best thing in Pynchon's self-consciously laid-back and funky new novel, "Inherent Vice" (Penguin; $27.95). The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play-original sin is an obvious analogy-but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, "Inherent Vice" does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It's a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch "Gilligan's Island" instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It's "The Maltese Falcon" starring Cheech and Chong, "The Big Sleep" as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it's funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It's funnier than Chandler, anyway.

The Boston Globe

What Pynchon is after with the prodigal absurdities of Doc's adventures is not really parody, but something larger. They are a way to enter into a time and place of extravagant delusions, innocent freedoms, and an intoxicated (literally) sense of possibility. And to do it without sententiousness, to write in psychedelic colors disciplined by a steel-on-flint intelligence.

O Magazine

Reading Thomas Pynchon again, one is reminded that fiction can clarify the world-capturing it as it seems to be-and it can also change the world by seeing it new ways. Pynchon is a magician in the second category: He applies language to what we know and all we've missed-giving new shape to both . . . .The book is exuberant, delightfully evocative of its era, and very funny.

Library Journal

So Doc Sportello, inveterate doper and sometime private eye, is sitting around hazy L.A. at the end of the Sixties when he gets a visit from former flame Shasta. Seems she's been seeing developer-turned-visionary Mickey Wolfmann, whose wife and boyfriend are cooking up a scheme to kidnap Wolfmann and want to cut her in. Meanwhile, black ex-con Tariq wants Doc's help in hooking up with Glen Charlock, a White Aryan he did business with behind bars, and he's pretty bummed that Channel Vista Estates, Wolfmann's latest development, has wiped out his neighborhood. Doc heads for Channel Vista, where he might have encountered Charlock had he not blacked out (it's those drugs?). Instead, Charlock winds up dead; Doc has another run-in with friendly nemesis Lt. Det. Bigfoot Bjornsen; and Wolfmann disappears. So, for that matter, does Shasta. And it gets even more complicated as Doc is off on one very weird acid trip of an investigation. VERDICT With whip-smart, psychedelic-bright language, Pynchon manages to convey the Sixties—except the Sixties were never really like this. This is Pynchon's world, and it's brilliant. The resolution is as crisp as Doc is laid-back. Highly recommended.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

For better and worse, this is the closest Pynchon is likely to come to a beach book. A psychedelic beach book, of course: It's hippie-era Los Angeles, and our hero smokes marijuana the way others smoke cigarettes, which is something of an occupational hazard in a profession that requires deductive abilities. About a third the length of its predecessor (Against the Day, 2006, etc.) and as breezy as a detective novel by Tom Robbins, the book begins with a beautiful woman walking into the office of private investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello to ask for help. Formerly Doc's girlfriend, Shasta has been associating more recently with Mickey Wolfmann, a very rich and married developer whom Doc knows from the newspapers as "the real estate big shot." Mickey's wife and her lover apparently want him institutionalized, but as usual in a Pynchon novel, there are conspiracies atop conspiracies as Doc tries to get to the people who are running the people who seem to be running things. With Charlie Manson poisoning the free-love ethos and land-grab developers putting the soul of Southern California up for grabs, Doc finds himself enmeshed deeper in a plot that defies resolution. The mystery focuses on the Golden Fang, which may be a schooner, a heroin cartel, an enterprise of "vertical integration" or a vast international conspiracy. Maybe all of the above. The story will make the most sense to those as stoned as Doc, though it's hard to resist questions like, "Anybody understand why they call it ‘real' estate?" or a simile such as "the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time"-highly appropriate for a protagonist who tends to divide the totality of experience into "groovy" and "bummer."Or, once, for emphasis, "Bumm. Er."Groovier than much of this erratic author's fiction, but a bummer compared with his best.

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