inherent vice
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Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchonâ 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 . . ……..
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– ISBN13: 9781594202247
– Condition: NEW
– Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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2009-12-01
By Matthew Pinzur (Miami, FL)
I never put books down, but had to make an exception. I like Pynchon, but this was just a mess. Every chapter was another empty character, a plot stuck in neutral and no sign that the tangle would ever come together. If the last quarter makes it all worthwhile, then so be it… I’ll have to live in ignorance.
2009-11-27
By Steve Dossey (Somewhere just beyond or before the crossroads)
This book must have been written by a cute undergraduate student working under Pynchon’s wing. The stoner jokes are not funny. The zeitgeist of the sixties is clearly contrived. This is an attempt to find the groove that Tom Wolfe, Tom Robbins and to a lesser extent Vonnegut so adeptly mined. Pychon’s attempt however is a miserable failure. If this MS had been submitted by an unpublished writer it would have been universally rejected. I left my copy in hotel room trash can. Really pathetic.
P.S. I have read V, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 which are all vastly superior works.
2009-11-25
By oddsfish (Winters, TX)
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.
2009-11-23
By C. A. Boylstein
I have not treated Pynchon’s latest novel as a “beach read” as some reviewers on amazon describe it. Thomas Pynchon is America’s greatest living author and one of its greatest writers ever. His is a true late modern voice who follows Fitzgerald and leads us by the hand into hyperreality. Completing his California trilogy (CoLot49, Vineland, now IV), Pynchon’s new protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello is a deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade. He is not hard edged, or tough – he’s Karmic.
If that doesn’t sound of interest to you, perhaps there’s a new vampire or wizard book coming out?
Anyway, if you are considering reading this book, read the reviews offered by the New Yorker or NYT – not some 12 year olds pretending they read books like these on Amazon.
2009-11-20
By T1818
The ending of ‘Inherent Vice’ has Doc Sportello the ‘hero’ of ‘Inherent Vice’ lost in a fog. ‘Inherent Vice’ is a very 60’s novel but at the same time it shows that a lot of the 60’s was missed by people in the 60’s. A lot of people were lost in the fog. There are really no larger forces at work here. The basic plot has been covered by hundreds of movies and books. In ‘Inherent Vice’ people are being tossed and turned by outside forces of which there is no attempt to grasp. Sex is available. Have sex. Drugs are available. Take drugs. People are flawed. Original Sin aka inherent vice is the key human fact. This is by no means a jeremiad against hippies. The guess is that hippies and now ex hippies are a substanital portion of Pynchon’s ‘crew’. Thomas Pynchon has the best natural ability of any writer in the US maybe the world but Pynchon here decided to write a book of half played out dope riffs. Of course much dope humor really does fall flat and fail to reach a punch line. The second half of the book is somewhat entertaining as the plot comes together somewhat entertaingly a first for Pychnon. ‘Inherent Vice’ might be filmable. ‘Inherent Vice’ is in many respects a valentine to 60’s hippies but the 60’s are still a mystery of which ‘Inherent Vice’ offers no clarification.
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