A "review" of Inherent Vice

Maybe this novel should have been called The Big Lot-49-ski. Or Dude, Where's My Noir?

I deeply enjoy the writing style of Thomas Pynchon, and even his wordily absurd and haltingly unapproachable works are still fun to read, right up until the point I put them down because I have lost track of plot, characters, and motivations.

Sometimes it really is the journey that's the worthier part.

Maybe it's me, but Tommy — oh, I call him Tommy by the way. We hang out a lot. Try to prove me wrong, I dare you. Anyway, Tommy said just about all that needed to be said about southern California in the late 1960s in The Crying of Lot 49, a short novel on the subject of how the past haunts us, forces us to act as executor to its will, and gets us involved in an age-old conspiracy surrounding an underground postal service. It was a vibrant snapshot of some of the psychotic cultural aspects of the era, of a time and a place where people had psychiatrists to medicate them into higher planes of existence, where nagging persistent paranoia was commonplace, and where love was not just free but plentiful, paranoia be damned.

Agree or disagree, he had his say in the matter. This somehow makes Inherent Vice seem, well, redundant. It's Oedipa's kid brother back to hit the same keys on his big sister's piano.

I really enjoyed the book, don't get me wrong. I don't care so much for what Tommy is saying so much as how he goes about saying it. The Library of Congress categorizes this book as "Private investigators—Fiction", "Los Angeles (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction", and "Experimental fiction". I take offense at that last one.

I can't tell you what Inherent Vice is. As is typical with a Pynchon novel, it's a funhouse mirror that reflects a wonderfully weird and distorted vision of what you choose to show it. In many ways, he's a modern-day Lewis Carroll. Thus, it's far more complex than any simple synopsis could impart. What Inherent Vice initially purports to resemble on the surface is a classic, almost derivative gumshoe story that if the Coen Brothers ever got wind of it, would make them feel an odd mixture of pride and copyright infringement.

The year in which the novel is set is not completely clear, but it's pinned down as occurring between 1969 and 1971. The protagonist is a lazy, clumsy, unrepentant marijuanaphiliac who is asked to take on a case that becomes much more complex than initially suspected involving a wealthy businessman, a mysterious schooner, and a cryptic organization that may or may not be involved with everything or nothing good and/or bad that is/is not happening.

Think Fletch. The book, genius, not the movie. Think The Big Lebowski. Think of how Lot 49 would have looked if it was written by Raymond Chandler. Think of a dozen noir story clichés — excuse me, staples — now stir them into SoCal in 1960-something or other and make it all... Pynchonic. It should smell like reefer and petroleum and have that bizarre yet wholly self-consistent logic to its worldview where fact and farce blur together but it all still makes sense at the time, like how I imagine dreams must be like. Like where it's OK to have characters named Trillium Fortnight and Puck Beaverton because, yeah, sure, why not have that as a real name here? I don't judge. Reality has seen fit to impart us with Dweezils and Moon Units, and lest you think I'm just hating on Frank Zappa, I'm pretty sure he had nothing to do with the Daphne Zunigas and the Blue Ivy Carters of the world. Suddenly, a sax player named Coy Harlingen isn't so quirky after all.

Unlike some of his earlier work, this novel has been slimmed down and most, but happily not all, of the absurdity has been streamlined to help the plot. It wouldn't be a noir novel worth anything if the plot didn't meander, but entire chapters dedicated to dream sequences and drug trips and trainspotting are mostly whittled down to the heart of what Tommy is really trying to convey: the time, the place, the visceral experience of being there and revealing only as much detail of the scene as you'd remember of it after you've woken up. It's only about 369 pages and he even manages to pack a trip to Las Vegas in there somewhere.

On top of everything, he is trying once again to capture the moment, the spirit of the place that is Los Angeles at the end of an era, when the summer of love is giving way to the autumn of no-one-knows-what-yet and there is uncertainty and confusion and doubt and the only thing everyone is completely sure of is that they cannot, and will not be permitted to keep doing what they've been doing. Like the twinge of sadness you feel when you realize your favorite band is playing their last song of their last encore and that any second now the lights will come up and it will all be over soon, the guts of Inherent Vice are much more substantial than the crime it dissects. It quietly whispers its fear of the unknown, not impending doom per se but impending force to change, the aching realization that you cannot remain where you are even though you haven't figured out where to go next, where the protagonist finds himself at times literally and figuratively in a fog.

Having read Inherent Vice, I know now how the caterpillar feels just before it begins to spin its cocoon, completely unsure of why it has to make one in the first place.