Inherent Vice
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/056eb350-7d62-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html
Review by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Published: August 3 2009
Notorious for producing vast books at enigmatically long intervals,
Thomas Pynchon is having a late-career burst of productivity.
Inherent Vice comes less than three years after Against the Day. The
last time the 72-year-old published so quickly was at the start of
his writing life, when his 1963 debut V was followed in 1966 by the
novella The Crying of Lot 49, the most accessible of his labyrinthine
fictions until now.
Inherent Vice, a far sprightlier outing than the 1,000-plus page
Against the Day, is Pynchon's freewheeling take on the private eye
genre. Like The Crying of Lot 49, it is set in California and
concerns a missing real estate tycoon not dead as in the earlier
book, but mysteriously abducted by forces that may include his wife
and her spiritual coach/lover, a group of heavily armed vigilantes,
the FBI, a shadowy criminal syndicate called Golden Fang, or some
Pynchonian mixture of all the above.
The book opens in 1970 in Gordita Beach, a fictional surfside
community near LAX airport where Pynchon's gumshoe Doc Sporletto
lives. A flashback-prone hippy more practised at joint-rolling than
deduction ("But what about Sherlock Holmes," he protests, "he did
coke all the time, man, it helped him solve cases"), Doc is
approached by a sexy ex-girlfriend who wants to track down her
disappeared lover, land developer Mickey Wolfmann.
A manic, although by Pynchon's usual standards surprisingly
comprehensible, plot ensues. Doc spars with his police detective
nemesis Bigfoot Bjornsen, gets tangled up in the murder of a Nazi
biker, is hired to locate a sax player in a surf music band who may
or may not be dead from a heroin overdose and meets a succession of
young women with rampant sexual appetites and minuscule outfits.
There are numerous dead ends and red herrings. However, the story is
a model of clarity compared to the monstrously overlong Against the
Day or Pynchon's dense 1973 masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. Magical
apparitions such as a talking Thomas Jefferson dollar coin are
explained as the product of Doc's avid drug use. The sax man's
Lazarus-like return from the dead is given a concrete explanation.
Bar an excursion to Las Vegas, there is none of the location-hopping
of Pynchon's other books.
The mood is nostalgic. Dope smoke and rock songs float from the
pages. Pynchon's gift for zingy dialogue is to the fore, as when
diminutive Doc reassures a client about his lack of height: "What I
lack in al-titude, I make up for in at-titude."
Doc's attitude is dopey and hopelessly libidinous, like a character
from the underground comic strip The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,
which takes its place among an abundance of period pop culture
references. Frequent mentions of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon
point to the extinction of the hippy dream in the 1970s. But Pynchon
does not allow the foreboding to spoil the fun. Doc's favourite term
remains "groovy", not "bummer".
From the little known about Pynchon's private life, Inherent Vice is
a trip down memory lane. The novelist, who has hidden himself from
public view, is thought to have lived in a Californian beach
community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is not the first time
he has drawn on the setting: Gordita Beach also turned up in an
earlier book, Vineland, which, like Inherent Vice, featured a hippy
protagonist.
Familiar themes recur. The milieu of the beach, with its
counterculture of surfers, dopers, dealers and drop-outs, is
contrasted with the "straightworld" of inland LA suburbia. Illegal
drugs are portrayed as a means of accessing realities forbidden by
the state. "Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it
was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see?" mutters a
conspiratorial character.
"Inherent vice" is a term from maritime law referring to an inbuilt
defect that causes an object to deteriorate or break. "It's what you
can't avoid," Doc's lawyer explains, "stuff marine policies don't
like to cover. Usually applies to cargo like eggs break but
sometimes it's also the vessel carrying it."
The concept chimes with Pynchon's view of the US as an unrealised
paradise corrupted by greed and power. Hippy hedonism, "these voyages
of self-discovery so common at that time", is also implicated: "the
fog of dope" that Doc walks around in is as much a distraction as a liberation.
The intellectual game play is characteristically dazzling. A subplot
about a proto-internet system links surfers waiting on their boards
for the perfect wave with net-heads at their computers searching for
swells and patterns of information. But the ideas are less intensely
applied than in Pynchon's previous books. The dialogue-driven action
also limits opportunities for his skewed lyricism, as glimpsed in a
peerless description of a beach where "the surf broke stately as the
base line to some great uncontainable rock 'n' roll classic".
Against the Day took almost a decade to write but failed to recapture
the crazed encyclopaedic energy of V and Gravity's Rainbow. Inherent
Vice is slighter, and all the better for it. Colourful and
pleasurable, the novel sums up Doc's vision of "the Psychedelic
Sixties, this little parenthesis of light" a garish 1960s
Enlightenment that lives on in Pynchon's writing.
--------
Inherent Vice, By Thomas Pynchon
Reviewed by Andy Martin
31 July 2009
I was reading the new Pynchon while grooving at a music festival. It
seemed as if the ambience of hipness and the aromatic mellow mood
found a fraternal echo in these pages. Listening to Thom Yorke and
reading Thomas Pynchon, more or less simultaneously, struck me as
deeply resonant and right. The book exudes a vibe that locates it
somewhere between Woodstock and Altamont, the rhythm of peace and
love syncopated and blood-spattered by baseball bats and motorbike chains.
Inherent Vice is Pynchon's hymn to the Sixties, both homage and
lament. In the novel we are at the end of the long Sixties, when the
Manson gang have already sliced up Sharon Tate, the US military is
still napalming Vietnam, and the West Coast counter-culture is
suffering from an immense post-coital depression and hangover.
Haight Ashbury is over the hill. The Beach Boys have given way to the
Grateful Dead. Everything is going to pieces, the way it always does
in Pynchon, but - and this is a first, I think - one improbable hero,
Doc Sportello, a beach bum turned private eye (thus a "gumsandal"),
is offering to fix it. Maybe I was inhaling too much at that
festival, but I feel that this could be Pynchon's most deliriously
enjoyable and compelling book to date.
If you had to pick one author that Pynchon most resembles, it would
have to be François Rabelais. Terence Cave once defined the work of
the French Renaissance master as the "cornucopian text", and Pynchon
is nothing if not cornucopian: overflowing, virtuosic, allusive,
fizzing with ideas, dense, erudite, insanely inventive, wildly
over-the-top, obscene, excessive, sprawling, polyphonic. Tony Tanner
suggested many moons ago that "entropy" was Pynchon's defining
feature, with his novels, like Gravity's Rainbow, poised on the brink
of dissolving into incoherence and coolness and indifference.
When his previous novel, Against the Day, came out, it inspired two
reviews in the New York Times, one passionately for, the other
seethingly against. But they agreed that Pynchon was verging on
unreadable. It seemed to depend on whether you were a professor of
literature or just a reader looking for a good time which way you
were going to jump.
Inherent Vice is different. Pynchon sets his idyllic Californian
dystopia in Los Angeles by way of referencing the great Raymond
Chandler tradition of Bay City. Doc Sportello is a long-haired Philip
Marlowe in flower-power flares with a joint in his hand. The sign on
the door says, "LSD Investigations".
He is handed the hermeneutic problem of solving a crime and the more
moral one of eradicating corruption. Perhaps he achieves neither, but
he sticks in his wayward way to the cynegetic paradigm of following
traces, scents, clues - like some ancient hairy hunter-gatherer
relentlessly pursuing his quarry - through the mean streets and
polluted beaches of SoCal.
The effect on Pynchon's raving entropic digressiveness is
spectacular. By his standards, Inherent Vice reads less like a novel
and more like a 300-page haiku or - to surrender to the mood of the
book - a song, weaving between soaring, transcendent acid-fuelled
highs and aching, suicidal lows. Even amid the dopehead haze, there
is a discipline to the absurdity, a logic to the rhetoric that was
not there before.
But there is another crucial difference. Inherent Vice has more heart
than any other Pynchon. His writing tends naturally towards satire
and denunciation. This new work is more of a love affair with a place
and a time. That mood is reflected in the relationships between the
characters. In most Pynchon you run into the "Where's Wally?"
problem. You know he (or she) is there somewhere, in the midst of the
teeming, screaming multitudes that populate Pynchonland, but do you
care enough to keep looking? In Inherent Vice, the beach is never too crowded.
At the core of the book is a triangle, hooking up Doc Sportello with
Shasta, his irresistible but ambiguous ex-girlfriendon the fringes of
Hollywood, and Bigfoot Bjornsen. This cop and hardcore anti-hippy who
nevertheless tolerates a lot of substance abuse: an avenger, friend,
enemy, and addict of chocolate-covered frozen bananas. The mazy plot
pulls together Bigfoot's recently deceased partner, Vincent
Indelicato, and a missing land development tycoon, Mickey Wolfmann.
There are echoes of Double Indemnity and a host of other noir
classics, but Pynchon has cunningly twisted them together and
crumbled in some mind-blowing ingredients of his own.
Sportello has a kind of benevolent empathy that serves him well on
his spaced-out odyssey, all the way to Las Vegas and back, weaving
between loan sharks-turned-hitmen and gay bodyguards with swastika
tattoos and officially dead sax players, gorgeous but stoned nymphos
and the Golden Fang (which may or may not be a consortium of dodgy
dentists), until he finally has to pull out a gun and start shooting.
The turbo-charged pimped-up vernacular reads like Beckett on speed
("Watch your head." "How'm I spoze to do that, man?"). To be honest,
I could still have done with a list of characters at the back to
remind me who is who.
Maybe, this time, that is part of the point. Inherent Vice has the
feel of an RD Laing fantasy where everyone is a divided self, late
20th-century schizoid man and woman, each capable of becoming their
opposites, just like the Wolfmann who precipitates the crisis by
turning hippy and trying to give away the land he has accumulated.
Pynchon rewrites The Endless Summer (Bruce Brown's mythopoeic
surf-orama) as the "Endless Bummer". But there is an underlying tone
of nostalgic wistfulness. If this is a failed utopia it still carries
you along as powerfully as a Harley Electra-Glide or a Ford Woodie.
Even with the smog, the oil spills and the occasional psychopath,
Sportello's Gordita Beach is still Paradise Regained to the Paradise
Lost of Pynchon's Vineland.
In the background is the pulsating throb of West Coast surf (and surf
bands), and ghost-like apparitions of the heaviest break in the world
far out to sea. Doc's alma mater is the Ondas Nudosas (literally,
Gnarly Waves) Community College. As in John Milius's film Big
Wednesday, people are always drifting off to Hawaii and Waimea Bay or
dreaming about the perfect wave. This is still the naïve wide-eyed
era of Huxley and Leary, and the doors of perception are wide open.
The mindset is pre-Aids innocence in which there is no safe sex, or
rather all sex is automatically safe ("great stoned fun") come what
may, including the "California department of corrections style".
Inherent Vice is an anatomy or perhaps an astrology of hipness. This
is anything but straight (or "flatland") history. Sun-kissed,
psychedelic and sexually-enhanced, Pynchon has re-embodied,
re-grooved the soul of the Sixties.
--
Andy Martin teaches French at Cambridge University; his books include
'Stealing the Wave' and 'Beware Invisible Cows' (Simon & Schuster)
--
Shy boss of American fiction: Thomas Pynchon
Born in 1937, raised on Long Island, Pynchon served in the US Navy
and graduated in English from Cornell University. After short stories
such as "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna", he published encyclopaedic,
polyphonic novels that secured his fame as a cult leader of American
fiction: 'V.' (1963), 'The Crying of Lot 49' (1966) and 'Gravity's
Rainbow' (1973). Later works include 'Vineland' (1990), 'Mason &
Dixon' (1997) and 'Against the Day' (2006). Never a "recluse", he
simply lives as quietly as he can in New York City.
-------
Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice"
Onward, Into the Fog
http://www.counterpunch.org/cabal07312009.html
By ALAN CABAL
July 31 - August 2, 2009
Thomas Pynchon ate my head in 1974. I was 20 years old at the time. I
spent that summer in Ocean City, NJ. I was living in my uncle's house
down there, four blocks from the beach. I took a minimum-wage job
over in Somers Point at a Bradlee's department store in a strip mall.
Jobs like that were plentiful then, even for a 20 year-old hippie.
They assigned me to the housewares department, which was pretty
amusing given that I had no knowledge of anything more complicated
than a frying pan or a spatula. I knew that forks were invented in
Croatia. Hardly any customers ever came in. I don't think it was me,
but the few that did invariably asked me for some really arcane
implement or another that I'd never heard of before, stuff like
counter-clockwise cap snafflers and left-handed tuber fletchers. That
summer I learned a lot about esoteric housewares, and rockets, and
plastic, and a hideous eldritch entity known as I.G. Farben, "the
Golden Octopus", as it was known in its time.
I'd brought some acid in little gelatin pyramids and a quarter-pound
of pot for the summer, knowing better than to try to score in Ocean
City. It's a small island. It's a dry town, no booze. Technically it
was illegal to serve booze in your home, but this was rarely and very
selectively enforced, almost never in the summer. Frat boys spend a
LOT of money. The drinking age was 18 back then.
I needed something fresh to read, so when I hit town I picked up the
paperback edition of Gravity's Rainbow, having no clue what it was
about or how it would impact my already drug-soaked fractal labyrinth
of a life. I still can't recall the specific impulse that motivated
me to buy it, as opposed to, say, some Philip K. Dick thing or more
H.P. Lovecraft, some horror, my usual beach fare. Stephen King wasn't
really on the map yet. I read it every day at lunch, which I took in
a pizza parlor across the parking lot from Bradlee's. Two slices and
a glass of milk, followed by a joint back by the dumpsters. I usually
took it to the beach after work, where I'd smoke dope and read until
it got too dark.
By the time I got to Slothrop's encounter with Grigori the octopus,
an incredibly deft simultaneous reference to Rasputin, the apocryphal
Book Of Enoch (ever popular with the consumer occultnik crowd), the
contemporary nickname for I.G. Farben, and Rudy Wurlitzer's fantastic
hippie novel Nog, I'd acquired a whole new wardrobe of OD fatigue
pants and Hawaiian shirts, taken to crashing parties from Sea Isle
City to Wildwood, and developed a penchant for quick hookups with
Philly girls in the bushes outside the Anchorage ("Seven Beers For A
Buck!") in Somers Point. Back then if you couldn't get laid at the
Anchorage, you couldn't get laid. This was the Golden Age of
humanity, between the Pill and the Plague. I thought I was Pirate Prentice.
I finished the book shortly before Labor Day and knew that I had just
experienced the most magnificent literary adventure of my life, not
to mention a near-perfect blueprint of the Forbidden Wing of 20th
century history, and a completely perfect summer of utterly joyous
chaos and crazy irresponsible sex. Thus began my Pynchon fixation,
and my delight in his every published work. As for the next 30 or so
years, well, life imitates art, especially art you like.
Deeply into 2006 and the manifest horror of open fascism and every
Pynchonian terror or boogeyman you can cite running shamelessly naked
in the streets and the corridors of power, I escaped from Las Vegas
in the middle of the night with my hide and very little else intact
and landed in the heart of Silicon Valley. Going for the low-hanging
fruit, I put in an application at Ikea, participated in a paid
simulated two-week lunar excursion at NASA's Ames Research Center,
and started hustling my editor at High Times to get me some space and
folding money to review Pynchon's forthcoming super-epic-Cinerama
monstrosity, Against The Day.
These negotiations were hilarious.
They're in New York City saying, "Like, why should High Times run a
review of Thomas Pynchon? None of our readers are going to read that."
I'm on the other end of the phone, surrounded with flowers and birds
and stoned, exploring the virtual Moon for six hours a day on Red
Bull and nicotine gum looking for water, saying "You dedicated lots
of space to William Burroughs. I loved him and I love his work, but
he hated pot and potheads, really. Didn't really respond well to
psychedelics at all. Thomas Pynchon is to pot as William Burroughs
was to heroin. Carl Sagan was a pothead. Not every pothead is a 16
year-old boy, no matter how hard we might try."
This went round and round until I managed to wrangle 350 words out of
them for $150. I pushed the due date all the way down to February so
I could actually read the book. I figured with deadlines and all,
given the release date of November 21, the severe lateness of the
galley deliveries (deliberate?), and just the massive size and sheer
density of the thing that very few of the critics would actually read
it. I wanted to make the most of my 350 words.
Meanwhile, after a series of prolonged interviewing and personality
testing, Ikea offered me a start date on a job selling rugs for $10
an hour. I had to take a piss test. I failed on the THC thing. I went
round on them about fobbing it off onto the lab to tell me I couldn't
work at Ikea, insisted I was no sort of beatnik hippie pothead, I
wanted something in writing from the old match seller's enterprise
itself, something I might honestly and on a relatively level playing
field contest, but they were adamantine and resolute in their refusal
to provide any documentation whatsoever of their whimsical
cancellation of my hire date.
I called the offices of the legal firm that sort of owns High Times,
suggesting a class action suit based on the presumptive nature of
drug testing. They dismissed the idea out of hand, saying "Where's
the class in this class action suit?" I responded that given that
every federal, state, county, and city job hire involves a drug test,
as well as far too many private enterprises, a half-page ad in High
Times itself might gather a class. They laughed.
I was exploring the lunar surface using some sort of exotic
skid-steerer (like a Bobcat or a tank) in search of seismic beacons
that had been left behind by a previous exploratory team that had
found water but mysteriously vanished shortly thereafter. The beacons
formed a trail to the reservoir. There were plenty of distractions.
Against The Day was the biggest and the best distraction. Pynchon had
finally topped Gravity's Rainbow. I did a deep web search on Dr.
Norbert Kraft, the director of my simulated lunar excursion. He's a
Pynchon character, for sure. He does good work, it pertains to our
human situation here. It's about teamwork.
What I did get to say in my scant 350 words was that Pynchon is the
last and greatest voice of the Beats, despite his absence from the
direct clique we have been trained to identify as "Beats." It's jazz:
you either get it or you don't. That was enough. I also indicated as
clearly as I could under such constraints that Against The Day was
the most beautiful work of literature I had ever experienced. It is.
His latest, Inherent Vice, is the most accessible novel he has
written. Weighing in at a mere 369 pages, it can be read easily over
the course of a weekend and involves no complex mathematical formulae
or hypotheses. Set mainly in Los Angeles in 1970 with the Manson
Family trials looming in the background, the book is a wild romp
through the paranoid landscape of post-'60s America. It's very
cinematic, the narrative doesn't pose any particular challenge to the
average reader and it would make a great movie with, say, Terry
Gilliam or Oliver Stone directing. My first take on it was "Holy
Shit! Pynchon has written a Tim Dorsey novel!", and that isn't too
far from the truth. But Inherent Vice is much more than that.
It might be the herald of a whole new genre: psychedelic noir. Kinky
Friedman and the aforementioned Tim Dorsey have both skimmed the
waters here, but neither of them has produced anything as thoroughly
soaked in dope as this thing, and Pynchon's well-known talent for
depicting the vast Manichean world of unseen forces bidding for
dominion over souls it at its clearest and sharpest here. His ability
to shift effortlessly from slapstick comedy to profound and lyrical
longing is his territory exclusively. No one else does this, and I'm
not sure that anyone else can. Here's an excerpt of noir prose that
is completely worthy of Chandler or Hammett:
"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,
though for sure not the usual weather. You heard people muttering to
the effect that last summer the beach didn't have summer till August,
and now there probably wouldn't be any winter till spring. Santa Anas
had been blowing all the smog out of downtown L.A., funneling between
the Hollywood and Puente Hills on westward through Gordita Beach and
out to sea, and this had been going on for what seemed like weeks
now. Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much
good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch
the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the
feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and
relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles
mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the
bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical,
sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of
tequila bottles were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor
store owners could be filling those bottles with anything anymore.
Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine
sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so
everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at
all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to
whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves
of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so
that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it
sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry,
the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour,
enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course
there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight."
The protagonist here is Doc Sportello, a hippie PI who is coming up
on 30 and smokes pot like a rasta. His ex-girlfriend reappears after
a long absence seeking his help in securing the well-being of a
billionaire real estate developer she's been having an affair with,
whose wife may be hatching a kidnap plot or worse to get her hands on
the loot. Sportello takes the job, and thereon hangs the tale.
The cast of characters includes Nazoid ex-cons and bikers, one with a
serious fixation on Ethel Merman, surfers and surf musicians
(including a zombie surf band), bent cops, heroin smugglers, black
militants and FBI agents, COINTELPRO informants and provocateurs,
Vegas mobsters, a reanimated dead junkie, sinister dentists, an LSD
guru whose main squeeze is fixated on the lost continent of Lemuria
(which may or may not be resurfacing off the coast of L.A.), and a
mysterious ship called The Golden Fang, the most demented and
enigmatic plot device in the book.
Pynchon's knowledge of surf music is encyclopedic, he very nearly
pounds us with it here, and I was delighted to see that he shares my
fondness for the Bonzo Dog Band, one of the truly great
under-appreciated acts of the period. His depiction of the creeping
menace of corporate fascism encroaching upon the various avatars of
freedom at play in the book speaks of personal experience.
It's a hugely comic novel that ends on a wistful, tragic note lost in
the fog, out on the freeway, the procession of the preterite, not
sure where they're going, not sure where they are. It's a love letter
to the Sixties, a wake, an elegy to doomed aspirations and thwarted
idealism, but it speaks to our present condition directly and
clearly, with an open heart. Nobody does it better.
Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press
369 Pages
ISBN 978-1-59420-224-7
$27.95
--
Alan Cabal lives in Mountain View, California. He can be reached at
al_cabal@yahoo.com
.
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