Inherent Vice: A Novel

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.

I'm a longtime Pynchon fan and eagerly read this newest installment. Inherent Vice is one of the most entertaining reads I've had in a long time. Subtle, funny, suspenseful, full of characters, intricate intertwined plot lines, hideous puns, and oddball inside jokes. It's all there. I always pick up a Pynchon novel expecting that it will be the Next Great American Novel. The man has talent and really pushes the boundaries of the genre. But in every one of his books, I soon forget about such critical judgements, I end up laughing uproariously, wandering down some rococo side plot, trying to sing the characters' silly lyrics. This time, I simply enjoyed the ride. And what a ride it is. It is a big fat mid 60s Eldorado ragtop with a killer 8-track tape deck cruising down Topanga Canyon with the wind in your hair. Singing at the top of your lungs.

Inherent Vice Bob Gelms “The sign on his door read LSD Investigations, LSD, as he explained when people asked, which was not often, standing for Location, Surveillance, Detection. Beneath this was a rendering of a giant bloodshot eyeball in the psychedelic favorites green and magenta, the detailing of whose literally thousands of frenzied capillaries had been subcontracted out to a commune of speed freaks who had long since migrated up to Sonoma. Potential clients had been known to spend hours gazing at the ocular maze work, often forgetting what they’d come here for.” That’s how it starts. It’s 1969 and everybody has become intimately acquainted with Maui Wowie, Panama Red, Michoacán, Acapulco Gold, Boo, Black Bart, Ganja, Thai Stick, Reefer, Colombian, Weed, Sinsemilia, Jamaican, Mary Jane or just plain old Pot. It’s a book, and the third in a series of unrelated novels about California, by America’s resident professor of American Studies, Thomas Pynchon. The book is called Inherent Vice and our intrepid Private Eye, Larry “Doc” Sportello, is personally familiar with all of them. He smokes so much weed it’s a wonder he doesn’t stumble through the whole book. Well, on second thought, he does stumble through the whole book but not before getting himself involved in a most outrageous and dangerous adventure. The eventual dead bodies attest to the danger. Doc is a Private Investigator and his ex old-lady wants him to find out what’s up with her current boy friend, the boyfriend’s wife and the wife’s boyfriend. After all it is California and that’s the entrance into a whole rainbow of colors, man, er, um, I mean, interconnected plot lines. Yeah, that’s it, interconnected plot lines. I haven’t had this much fun reading a novel since I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. I bumped into this reading Rolling Stone Magazine, “Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is becoming an essential component to any Paul Thomas Anderson film. After scoring the director's last two movies — There Will Be Blood and The Master — Greenwood has signed on to compose music for Anderson's upcoming film Inherent Vice, according to Film Music Reporter. The film is based on Thomas Pynchon's 2009 crime novel of the same name. Set in Los Angeles in the 1960s, the movie centers around a detective looking for a kidnapped girl. Joaquin Phoenix, star of Anderson's The Master, will reunite with the filmmaker in the main role of Larry "Doc" Sportello. Inherent Vice also stars Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benecio del Toro and Maya Rudolph.” This would be the first real movie made from a Pynchon book. There was an attempt at filming Gravity’s Rainbow and an aborted attempt at filming The Crying of Lot 49. Apparently, the screenplay for Inherent Vice has Mr. Pynchon’s blessing. Trying to describe a Thomas Pynchon plot is like trying to pick up a ball of mercury. It squishes out and runs all over the place. Inherent Vice, as simple as I can make it, is about Doc Sportello investigating a missing person; possibly a kidnapping; possibly a murder. Just when you think you have that down it turns out someone else was kidnapped and someone murders the wrong person. The plot really doesn’t matter. What matters is the collision of all these characters in a plume of drug besotted humor. It’s a very funny book; particularly if you were part of the 60’s and can’t remember a whole lot of it because, well, because, you know. “‘What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.’” Now about the title, most, if not all, Mr. Pynchon’s titles are enigmatic. Until you run across them in the book because he usually explains them, sort of. The term inherent vice is found in a number of his other works but only once in Inherent Vice. “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. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.” It calls to mind one of Mr. Pynchon’s enduring motifs, that of entropy. Basically everything devolves into chaos, everything falls apart because of the nature of what IS falling apart. Here is an example, the inherent vice of paper is the acid in the paper which will eventually destroy it. Read the book you will see what I mean. Thomas Pynchon is a supremely gifted writer with a reputation for being a difficult read. His two latest books should not be counted among the difficult ones like Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day, or Mason & Dixon. Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge are very approachable and the humor is right on the surface. They both come highly recommended, especially Inherent Vice.

I came across this book when listening to the WTF podcast where Marc Maron interview Paul Thomas Anderson about his film adaptation. I've been trying to expand my reading horizons so I jumped in. Pynchon uses the Private Investigator genre to explore the culture changes as the 1960s merged into the 1970s. This was when the Tate LaBianca murders by the Manson family rocked the peace, love, and trust ethos of the free love movement. Change was in the air: "...life in psychedeic-sixites L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave a joint at against too much trust, and the seventies were looking no more promising." [p 70] Los Angeles in the 60s were all about drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Doc Sportello, Pynchon's protagonist, is a hip (hippie?) Private I, into all of the above as he investigates the disappearance of his ex girlfriend and her current boyfriend, a real estate mogul. The further Doc gets into the investigation the more corruption he finds in law enforcement, politics and the establishment as they pushback against the love and drug culture. The establishment uses bullies and thugs to reestablish its power; Doc realizes "If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the s***work, who'd make it happen." [p 129] I like the interplay between Doc and Bigfoot - his adversary/helpmate(?) in the police department. There is plenty of ambiguity and potential double crossing to keep the reader turning the pages. One section toward the end gets a little gory but thankfully it didn't go on too long. Pynchon revels in the feeling of the time, channeling Hunter S Thompson: "On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica." [p 50]. I'm not a big reader of the Private Investigator genre so I can't rate the novel on how well it adheres to those conventions. That being said, it seems to contain many of the common elements: a broke PI with a shabby office working the underground and collaborating with the police when necessary. I especially like look back at the 60s through the lens of the 21st century; it elevates the novel from a simple read and toss detective novel to a more nuanced piece of work. Personally, I liked reading this take on L.A. in the 60s given that I was a high school kid looking into the city with awe and wonder from the Antelope Valley, just the other side of the San Gabriel mountains. My biggest quibble is with the use of the beginning of the internet (Arpanet) that one of the characters uses to help Doc. It seems too much of deux ex machina to get information to move the story along.

Doc Sportello is the weed-smoking, long-haired private detective in Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice, which is experiencing renewed interest because the movie version, also called Inherent Vice, just appeared in theaters. As a writer, Pynchon, a towering figure in modern American literature, gives readers no time to take a breath. Action starts with the first sentence of Inherent Vice, “[s]he came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had.” That’s Doc’s ex-girlfriend, Shasta, and she needs a favor. She needs to have Doc check out her new boyfriend, who she has been asked to betray. Doc’s a stoner, a bit past his prime years, but he’s a good guy and that gets him through what becomes a long board ride through some pretty scary surf. We’re in California, halfway between the Beach bands/surfer music days and into the post-Charles Manson days of the hippie movement, which is beginning to get into some pretty paranoid territory. Capitalism in the days of the drug culture sounds beside the point, but to those who turn culture into profit, business is never beside the point. So we have Doc wandering through a weird LA full of dopers, musicians, addicts and rehab establishments, real estate developers, and shadowy multinational drug dealers/importers. What should happen to Michael “Mickey” Wolfmann, husband and cheater-boyfriend? Should he be committed to an unnamed institution and should Shasta help? Where is Mickey Wolfmann anyway? Suddenly no one can find him even though, only yesterday, he had been peddling lots in his new desert development all over the TV (although all of the tech devices Doc deals with seem to have been invented in a parallel universe (check out the sound system in the trunk of his car.) (Cars also matter in this story.) Doc Sportello’s subsequent investigative activities attract the attention of Bigfoot Bjornsen, a cop, who cannot be shaken loose and the attention of various shady characters who Doc, in his marijuana haze manages to elude through some weird combo of charm and the luck of the stoned. It’s a romp of sorts through an LA that is not romanticized in any way. That Thomas Pynchon really did live in LA in the 60’s and 70’s gives him the chops to offer us a social commentary, set in day many of us remember as sort of an idealistic construct. Although Pynchon highlights mankind’s less than elegant greed and pursuit of wealth, he doesn’t moralize or suggest that we will ever leave our baser natures behind, but that we may, eventually, catch a brief breath of sweet peace and virtue between one sleazy deal and the next. Pynchon is a writer who is studied in college literature courses, who is hailed as a great “post modernist” writer and who has won prizes. The best part is that you don’t have to worry about any of these credentials if you don’t really want to. Inherent Vice satisfies as a fast-moving and very offbeat PI case, solved by a very “high” detective named Doc Sportello. You may relate to the story a bit more closely if you have, at least once, been talked into getting high yourself, although that may be totally unnecessary, and I do not recommend that you get any new habits in order to read this book. The novel also seems sort of like a ‘guy-thing’ but such distinctions are not necessarily as true as they once were.

Just finished re-reading "Inherent Vice" (in preparation for the Paul Thomas Anderson movie opening in a week), and I enjoyed it even more than the first time. Disparaged as "Pynchon Lite" by critics who just can't imagine why he doesn't write another "Gravity's Rainbow," the book is a relatively light read, gracefully assuming the nominal form of an LA noir novel, and more-or-less moving the plot linearly from the femme fatale getting the PI involved, through a twisted nest of plots and subplots populated by odd characters, to a happy albeit ambiguous resolution. This is a gross simplification, of course, because we are talking about Thomas Pynchon, so there are subplot deadends, odd (and oddly-named) characters who appear and disappear, puns, songs, satires, paranoia, and more than a heavy haze of dope smoke. Not exactly the dense read of GR or "Against the Day," although clearly equal in ribaldry to "Mason & Dixon." I couldn't help feeling that TP had a particular affinity for the sympathetic, easy-going Doc (the PI), and for the times and places he writes about (LA beach towns at the end of the 60's). Doing the math, TP would have been in his mid-30's then, and the rumors have him spending considerable time in LA around that time (if Jules Siegel is to be believed), working on GR. Perhaps now that he's in his 70's, TP's loosening up a bit about himself, telling some stories out of school. But that's just me thinking out loud. The book is a romp, a fast read for TP (although you still have to be active and pay attention), and it's lots of fun. I can't wait to see what PTA does with the film.

You can feel the clamor on the day a Pynchon novel is released. By this time (of my own review), most of the Pynchonites have inhaled Inherent Vice and likely reviewed it. Er, I was kind of slow on the uptake. I admit--writing this review is largely a way to share the vibe, a nod to posterity. Add to the queue and tip a hat to TP and my fellow readers. What can I say about his new release that is going to limn the ebullient, esoteric, burlesque brilliance that is Pynchon? Inherent Vice is Pynchon being Pynchon--a little more compact, a smoother flow for the previously uninitiated, a minor disappointment? for lovers of Gravity's Rainbow. This novel still contains disparate threads, hilarious uptakes, pause for lyrics and digressions--but it gets back on track--no deep rabbit holes here. The focus is tighter than usual, ultimately concentrating on Doc Sportello and his comically dangerous adventures as a PI in LA. The narrative flow favors cinematic appeal, also--there is an essentially linear progression of a noirish detective story. Moreover, it is an exhilarating homage to the sixties. There is enough pot smoking and acid dropping to leave traces on the reader's fingers as the pages turn. There's surf to roar in your ears; babes and bikinis and beaches; bad guys and moral ambiguity; greed and dirty money; and a savior or two. I don't read Pynchon for the plots, but Inherent Vice actually has a fairly strong one, a main one, that keeps you guessing. If you haven't yet plunged into Pynchon, this isn't a bad place to start. It's a jubilant paean to sex, drugs, surfing, and rock 'n roll. A stoner's tribute. Additionally, it embodies the trademark ribald, madcap mayhem and debauchery along with outlaw erudition and addiction inherent to the verse of Thomas Pynchon.

It's just another endless summer here in Gordita Beach, California, 1970. While the decade of mindless optimism and free love might be drifting off in a haze of car exhaust around the freeways of central L.A., things are still pretty groovy along the coast, and Doc Sportello, P.I. continues fighting crime like it's the 60's--not with a gun, but a joint in his hand? Doc is more of a gum-sandal than gum-shoe--he'll tell you this himself in the book's video preview (perhaps the first ever) distributed by Pynchon via YouTube. While Sherlock Homes aficionados might worry about his hazy short-term memory, he makes up for his impaired deductive skills ten-fold in terms of attitude. Whether it's scoping out a famous surf-rock band's 3-D fiberglass reproduction of Hokusai's Great Wave of Kanagawa, or looking for a fascist real estate mogul turned peyote induced philanthropist through a series of heavily guarded desert zomes, Sportello yields the unparalleled ability to fit into almost any social situation--he gets along with nearly everyone; even `Bigfoot' Bjornson, the chocolate-covered banana scarfing, hippie-hating cop. It all seems fairly innocent until his `ex-old lady' turns up with a case that makes a John Grisham novel maybe just seem like a bad acid flash-back. For Pynchon, the enigmatic granddaddy of postmodern literature, nothing could be more appropriate than, well, something completely different. The author of textual whales like Gravity's Rainbow--with a mass and scope comparable to Ulysses and prose which moves like unprocessed molasses--Inherent Vice strikes a correspondingly opposite extreme: Crime fiction's first purpose is to entertain, fulfill a commodity which today's bookstore goer has come to expect. The book is easy, inviting, lovingly bizarre, and most importantly, bound by the mega-icons of the era's popular culture which Pynchon is looking to redefine. You'll find Pynchon's old dose of bogus song lyrics, arcane B-movie spoofs, poetic wit and charming social commentary all wrapped up and burning from an orange Rizla-paper. It's the rare sort of novel that demonstrates that we don't require an epic to transcend, and that there's no harm in having a little bit of fun while we're at it.

Magnifique en anglais, une langue qui vibre ,on respire Los Angeles ,de la décoration 50s au Pacifique La luminosité des boulevards , les policiers transpirants

Excellent..kind of complex. Movie was less complex but the book really captured the era

Una novela policíaca pero al estilo de Pynchon lleno de personajes y de distintas conspiraciones y tramas que siempre estarán ocultas, pero que es una buena forma de adentrarse al mundo de Pynchon

While 'Inherent Vice' takes us on a wild, psychedelic journey, it doesn't quite hit the high notes that e.g. 'The Crying of Lot 49' does. Pynchon's signature complexity is there, but the narrative feels more tangled than intricate. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing - intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfying.

ピンチョンの作品は、『V』や『重力の虹』など、主要作品は翻訳、原書、両方持っているが、本作は比較的新しいので、持っていなかった。それが映画化されたので、原作を押さえておくために購入した。映画を先に見てしまったが、詳細を確認するために本作を読んでいる。もっといいのは、同じKIndleで、Pynchonの作品を解説したものがあるが、その解説したものだと、あらすじが英語でわかって役立つ。例によって、登場人物が多く、事件が入り組み、人物たちの名前も普通ではないので、こうした「文字情報」を参照することが、ほかの作家にも増して有益である。