Inherent Vice (2009)

by Thomas Pynchon

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30
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (johnxlibris)
johnxlibris: Similar feel and locale. Conspiracies abound.
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea (Bigrider7)
Bigrider7: A pair of whimsical books where reality is never quite what it appears, and is much more indiscrete and lacking in continuity than many of us can handle. Secrets about how life operates lurking just beyond the views of perceptions
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The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (LamontCranston)
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (smichaelwilson)
smichaelwilson: Both books take a dark yet whimsical journey through the 60s/70s counterculture, and the decay of America's cultural enlightenment.

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A pesar de las críticas que ha recibido esta novela por parte de críticos medio snobs, Inherent vice me pareció un libro genial. Divertido, complejo, coloquial, laberíntico. (

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LeoOrozco | Feb 26, 2019 |

It is no great surprise when this pothead noir changes location from coastal southern California to Las Vegas, Correct, think [b:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas|7745|Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas|Hunter S. Thompson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1333056001s/7745.jpg|1309111]. Inherant Vice is not bound by similar streams of endless paraphernalia but rather takes the vantage point that Thompson employed, looking back from the dark hues of Nixonia across the ruins of Altamont to the legacy of Great Promise. Pynchon layers the atmosphere with puns, free love and a high tide of chemical paranoia. Doc, his protagonist, is on the cusp of a sinister conspiracy but unfortunately falls asleep or burns one at moments of elucidation. The birth of the internet assists, but requires an enormous cost. The bliss of free radio is trumpeted. Pop music does tend to dominate the narrative. Surf rock reigns here. This is a rollicking good time but one which warns in our own age of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
(

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jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |

This was my first Pynchon novel, and it will probably be my last. He's a fine writer, but as another reviewer put it, his stuff is "dick lit". Maybe if I had tried reading him when I was younger I would have been more impressed.... (

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jtdancer | Jun 30, 2018 |

I am sad to say I found myself completely annoyed by this one. I made it to the end and remember next to nothing because I guess I didn't care at all. (

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DFratini | Apr 23, 2018 |

“. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire . . .” (

)

grebmops | Apr 9, 2018 |

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Both shorter and easier to read than any of Pynchon’s previous novels apart from The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice gives the impression of having been easier to write, too. It’s less than three years since Against the Day was published, compared to the 17 that passed between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. That may be one reason why, characteristically hilarious and thought-provoking though it is, Inherent Vice lacks much of the menace and the passion of its predecessors.

added by Shortride | editLondon Review of Books, Thomas Jones (Sep 10, 2009)

Inherent Vice once again delivers the trademark rollicking with-it-ness of an author who doesn’t create fantasy worlds so much as show us our own world at its most fantastic. This time, however, it’s mostly for fun, a high-five for those who were there then, a glimpse into the groove of it all for those who otherwise can only daydream while sampling what Burbank hath bequeathed, whether Adam-12 re-runs, or those Warners/Reprise samplers on used vinyl.

added by Shortride | editQuarterly Conversation, Donald Brown (Sep 1, 2009)

Inherent Vice is by far the least puzzling Pynchon book to enter our airspace: a goof on the Los Angeles noir, starring a chronically stoned PI with a psychedelic wardrobe and a hankering for pizza. At fewer than four hundred pages, it’s also the shortest Pynchon novel to appear since Vineland (1990); you could almost recommend it to your book club, or to your kids, if they still read books.

added by Shortride | editBookforum, Paul La Farge (Sep 1, 2009)

Ultimately – perhaps regrettably – Inherent Vice is a wash. Depending on your angle, it’s either a breezy Something that looks like an airy Nothing, or vice versa.

added by Shortride | editThe Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg (Aug 31, 2009)

In his zany new novel, Inherent Vice, Pynchon goes to the Golden State again, tunneling back to the early 1970s, to paint a nostalgic portrait of a fictional beach town north of LA. Here, the counterculture has lost out to the forces of control, governmental power and, well, sobriety.

added by Shortride | editThe Dallas Morning News, John Freeman (Aug 23, 2009)

Like the stoned symposium on tuna, Doc’s manhunt for the AWOL billionaire eventually spirals off into absurdity, becoming a collage of trippy interludes peopled by all manner of goofs and lowlifes. These scenes only fitfully advance the narrative and sometimes cause us to forget there is one. But that’s as expected, since 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 patternmaking amped way up by his intake of hallucinogens.

added by Shortride | editThe New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn (Aug 23, 2009)

Pynchon is clearly playing around, but this isn’t an easy read; the cast numbers in the thousands, and trying to keep track of the various wheels within wheels can induce motion sickness. Thankfully, the novel is a blast to read regardless of whether it makes sense. It’s as funny as Against The Day was obscure, and the biggest surprise is the way the friendly surface holds true.

added by Shortride | editA. V. Club, Zack Handlen (Aug 20, 2009)

Pynchon doesn't do closure. What he does, and brilliantly, is open windows onto a universe where we're all in custody, but we're none of us sure who put on the cuffs.

added by Shortride | editTime, Richard Lacayo (Aug 17, 2009)

Pynchon does his best to make it all fun, but Doc still can’t shake his funk as his era fades. He remains positive, though, that somehow “a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time,” which is certainly what Pynchon, as an original hipster himself, tries to do, by redeeming the excesses of the past through a reappraisal of Doc’s era.

added by Shortride | editNational Post, Tim Jacobs (Aug 15, 2009)

Inherent Vice is significantly shorter and less demanding than other recent Pynchon novels, if ultimately less compelling as well. Having weighed things out, unless I'd get some extra letters behind my last name for the effort, I think I'd watch Fletch twice before reading it a second time.

added by Shortride | editThe Globe and Mail, Randy Boyagoda (Aug 15, 2009)

"Inherent Vice" offers a simplified version of Pynchon's enduring political theme, the way that the search for freedom and solidarity, be by the Wobblies or bebop musicians or 60's longhairs, is forever being done in by those who would appropriate the whole world under the banner of greed and fear. Like a good noir detective, Pynchon roots for the underdog. But he knows that the world's inherent vice is that it belongs to the powerful.

added by Shortride | editNational Public Radio, John Powers (Aug 12, 2009)

Well, there are the drugs, the paranoia, the sex, the attitude and the humor. Other than that, Thomas Pynchon -- with his latest novel, Inherent Vice -- is having a great time expertly channeling the hard-boiled detective riffs of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

added by Shortride | editChicago Sun-Times, John Barron (Aug 9, 2009)

Here's how much fun this novel is: En route to a family reunion recently, I spent three stormy hours on the runway of the Philadelphia airport in a dinky commuter jet, stuck next to a guy I came to think of as Mr. Angry Man. But I was reading Inherent Vice, and I was having such a blast following Doc Sportello around Gordita Beach circa 1969 that I never even felt annoyed.

added by Shortride | editSt. Petersburg Times, Colette Bancroft (Aug 9, 2009)

The author wraps his serio-comic story in a relatively conventional fashion, but it's a testament to his narrative control that he could steer the tale toward a satisfying finale. In the end, "Inherent Vice" emerges as a deeply cynical yet amusing snapshot of the Woodstock generation's final days in the sun.

added by Shortride | editThe Washington Times, Christian Toto (Aug 9, 2009)

What's most impressive about Pynchon is his versatility. Having proven his ability to achieve boredom on a colossal scale with his previous novel, 2006's indigestible bolus of literary roughage "Against the Day," Pynchon now proves equally dull as a relative pamphleteer who limits himself to a mere 369 pages, then simply stops instead of concludes.

"Inherent Vice" is the work of an anti-Elmore Leonard. Leonard says the key to his strategy is leaving out the boring bits. Pynchon dares to leave out the interesting stuff.

added by Shortride | editNew York Post, Kyle Smith (Aug 9, 2009)

Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer. With his most accessible book to date – half Chinatown, half Fear and Loathing, all searing jeremiad about the modern American soul – he may have come up with something even the British literati can read.

added by Shortride | editThe Independent on Sunday, Thomas Leveritt (Aug 9, 2009)

I don't know that Thomas Pynchon has responded to a dare - unless he dared himself, as often the best writers do - to write a deliciously composed dark comedy - a pastiche of the noir detective novel - about Southern California in the late '60s and early '70s and bring it in under 400 pages. But he's done just that. And I'm guessing that most Pynchon fans will be delighted by it. And it may well bring him new young readers for whom this recently departed (psychedelic) era may be as remote as ancient Greece or Rome.

added by Shortride | editSan Francisco Chronicle, Alan Cheuse (Aug 9, 2009)

Pynchon is such an intelligent and stylish writer, he can find pay dirt in any vein. Once he gets his mojo going here, the story coalesces into an enjoyably lunatic tapestry... With his inimitable voice and unrivaled imagination, Pynchon is always a pleasure to read, even at his most confounding. Inherent Vice still seems like an exploded subplot, a rambling riff from one of his longer, richer novels. Groovy but indulgent.

added by Shortride | editThe Philadelphia Inquirer, David Hiltbrand (Aug 9, 2009)

There might be serious themes bubbling under the surface, enough to make it more than a pure diversion, but it is what Graham Greene might have called an "entertainment"... In fact, this is all a bit silly, really – but, handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, is as much fun to read as anything you will come across this summer. And how long has it been since Pynchon was fun?

added by Shortride | editThe Scotsman, Nicholas Lezard (Aug 8, 2009)

At this point, to attempt to trace the various and tangled lines of intrigue and corruption the novel draws across L.A. and Las Vegas, would take too much space and give away entirely too much. The fun is in the unraveling of the plot and the energy and color with which Pynchon paints his many eccentric, sexy, insane, hapless, and evil characters.

added by Shortride | editPopMatters, Christopher Guerin (Aug 7, 2009)

One of the many fascinations of this absorbing and frequently funny crime novel is the way in which its relatively flimsy structure holds Pynchon’s familiar obsessions and techniques.

added by Shortride | editThe Times Literary Supplement, Paul Quinn (Aug 7, 2009)

So, take it to beach, if you like, and spend an afternoon reading it. “Inherent Vice” will do as well, I suppose, as any of a half-dozen other volumes on the summer fiction best-seller list. But isn’t that a sad, diminished way to describe a Thomas Pynchon novel?

added by Shortride | editThe Wall Street Journal, Joseph Bottum (Aug 7, 2009)

From Thomas Pynchon, an author we expect to take decadelong breaks, now emerges his second novel in three years. The pace does him good: Inherent Vice, besides being the literary giant’s most accessible work, is the kind of confident, relaxed effort that might signal a golden age ahead.

added by Shortride | editTime Out New York, Joshua Rothkopf (Aug 6, 2009)

Raymond Chandler meets Panama Red in Thomas Pynchon's casual, occasionally hilarious "Inherent Vice" - which makes sense for an author whose works can be measured in kilos (especially the last two, "Mason & Dixon" and "Against the Day"). It also makes sense for an author whose work has long married the perversely dystopic to the poetically giddy, with the same cosmic unease with which louche noir detectives have long found a home under the insistent Los Angeles sun.

added by Shortride | editNewsday, John Anderson (Aug 6, 2009)

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.

added by Shortride | editThe Washington Post, Michael Dirda (Aug 6, 2009)

added by Shortride | editThe Village Voice, Zach Baron (Aug 4, 2009)

Inherent Vice laments the erosion of the social, political and ethical possibilities inherent in the protests and upheavals of the 1960s. It shows Pynchon can deliver a rousing, hilarious and streamlined neo-noir tale that touches on his perennial themes without getting entangled in them.

added by Shortride | editPlayboy, Matt Steigbigel (Aug 4, 2009)

I quarreled with Inherent Vice, the latest novel from the reclusive Thomas Pynchon. I liked its wit, style, and grasp of locale, but deplored its cavalier way with plot. The book confounds, entertains, and stumbles in almost equal measure.

added by Shortride | editThe Christian Science Monitor, Carlo Wolff (Aug 4, 2009)

Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.”... to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system.

added by Shortride | editThe New York Times, Michiko Kakutani (Aug 4, 2009)

One could still theoretically argue that any Pynchon novel is preferable to none, and Inherent Vice, which seems almost preternaturally aware of its own limitations (as suggested by its title), still offers us the pleasure of his company. Yet, to paraphrase that jacket copy: If you can remember the '60s and the early '70s, and what emerged from Pynchon's head in those days, you can't forget those books—and then you … or, wait … It's impossible not to be disappointed that the Renaissance intellectual, who blended populist aspirations with the wildest of fancies and cast unnervingly instructive light on our times, has settled for such a modest diversion.

added by Shortride | editSlate, Jonathan Rosenbaum (Aug 3, 2009)

All of which suggests a cold, dark novel -- but as it happens “Inherent Vice” is Pynchon’s sunniest book. He may not have lost his pessimism, but the lethal intensity of the novels he was writing in his 20s and 30s, when his own future was still uncertain, has disappeared. And that’s a problem. For all the corruption and violence and evil that Doc turns up along the way, it never feels like very much is really at stake. The book begins to seem long.

added by Shortride | editBloomberg News, Craig Seligman (Aug 3, 2009)

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.

added by Shortride | editRolling Stone, Rob Sheffield (Aug 3, 2009)

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.

added by Shortride | editFinancial Times, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (Aug 3, 2009)

“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.

added by Shortride | editThe New Yorker, Louis Menard (Aug 3, 2009)

Pynchon is brimming over with asides... chucklers that make "Inherent Vice" great entertainment. But, perhaps I need to reconsider, taking into account the man's reputation in some quarters as an American genius.

Could his new book really be a symbol-filled allegory about the nature of the modern novel, a Nabokovian joke about fiction and its ultimate meaning?

Sounds like I've been smoking some heavy-duty stuff, too. Naw, I think Pynchon's just having a blast, and we are lucky to join in.

added by Shortride | editPittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bob Hoover (Aug 2, 2009)

All of Pynchon's novels since Lot 49 (yes, I'm including Gravity's Rainbow) have suffered terribly from bloat, a more-is-more grandiosity and runaway page inflation. Inherent Vice is shorter, thank heavens, but still comes in overweight. The wise-guy patter, so essential to successful noir, is lame. There are stretches where the writing clunks around like Doc's Dodge Dart. Pynchon is one of the least graceful stylists of major contemporary authors, and he does nothing to redeem that reputation here.

Still, he is a major contemporary author for a reason. More than 40 years ago he sounded notes of dire foreboding about where the culture was heading. Going back in time he essentially tells the same story, but now from the perspective of someone who wants to reconsider how it all went wrong.

added by Shortride | editToronto Star, Alex Good (Aug 2, 2009)

I've cogitated happily for days about all the implications of "A screaming comes across the sky" (the first line in "Gravity's Rainbow"), and while it's unfair to make single sentences stand for whole books, compare the first line of "Inherent Vice": "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to." There's simply far less pull. Strangely, since Pynchon is the master of the shaggy-dog story and nonlinear plot, it's not the language but the (by his standards) straightforward, clue-driven story that propels me through "Inherent Vice."

added by Shortride | editAustin American-Statesman, Jeff Severs (Aug 2, 2009)

It's easy to forget, among all his games and puzzles, that Pynchon can write razor-sharp beauty with the best of them. A page-long description of the Santa Anas demands a place next to classic passages by Chandler and Joan Didion. In Pynchon's big books, these devastating descriptions, particularly of place, are often swept away in the tide of prose and characters. Here, in a novel that focuses on Los Angeles so sharply that Tommy's is pinpointed by its cross streets, they shine.

added by Shortride | editLos Angeles Times, Carolyn Kellogg (Aug 2, 2009)

[A] plot best thought of as a state-of-the-art bomb that detonates, releasing dozens of bomblets that explode in turn to pierce the targets with thousands of tiny metal fragments. The reader is not just pulverized but virtually aerated. To spare my own readers, I make no attempt to put in order all the simultaneous adventures, encounters, and peculiar finds that Doc comes across. Not that I could.

added by Shortride | editThe Boston Globe, Richard Eder (Aug 2, 2009)

When things finally resolve into one big classic Pynchon parable of conspiratorial corporate greed, the solution seems preordained and therefore totally harmless. It feels like the net of genre constraints has been torn down, which drains the game of most of its meaning. With no suspense and nothing at stake, Pynchon’s manic energy just feels like aimless invention.

added by Shortride | editNew York, Sam Anderson (Aug 2, 2009)

[Inherent Vice] delivers at least two big surprises. The first is that it starts out as a pastiche of a well-known genre, the big-city private eye tale, though with a psychedelic twist: Pynchon's private eye is a permanently stoned hippie based in southern California, "circa 1970". The second is that it more or less stays that way, with no sustained excursions into mathematical logic or mind-bending shifts of narrative direction.

added by Shortride | editThe Guardian, Christopher Tayler (Aug 1, 2009)

The book is exuberant, delightfully evocative of its era, and very funny—one rarely hears mention of Pynchon's wonderful feel for comedy—and it has behind it a drumbeat of warning, about the kind of society we were building then and are living in now, in which nothing is private and all the important public mysteries will remain unsolved.

added by Shortride | editO, the Oprah Magazine, Vince Passaro (Aug 1, 2009)

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.

added by Shortride | editThe Independent, Andy Martin (Jul 31, 2009)

"Inherent Vice" almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled "Against the Day;" in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is all too typical of Pynchon's recent fiction, lumbers through a monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in "Oliver Twist"... What ultimately delivers "Inherent Vice" from this futility are the stubbornly individualistic imperatives of its borrowed genre. The detective story must resolve around a central character -- in this case, Doc -- and Pynchon has no choice but to make something of him. Because his creator is fundamentally sweet (unlike, say, Philip Marlowe's), Doc turns out all right

added by Shortride | editSalon, Laura Miller (Jul 31, 2009)

"Inherent Vice" has weird moments, but is for the most part a fairly conventional detective story. Doc is a counterculture Sam Spade, shaped by the hard-boiled novels and movies he loves. He could hang his eyeball signboard in any number of California tales, Kem Nunn's surfer-noir "Tapping the Source," and Northern California dope-grower novels such as T.C. Boyle's "Budding Prospects" and Denis Johnson's "Already Dead," all of which were written in Pynchon's shadow.

added by Shortride | editThe Oregonian, Vernon Peterson (Jul 30, 2009)

It is in the moments away from the stoned haze of plot that this book is at its best. The sentences have their stately beauty, and Pynchon is poignantly good on the heartsick detective, his "lovelorn rectogenital throb".

added by Shortride | editNew Statesman, David Flusfeder (Jul 30, 2009)

Inherent Vice is Pynchon looking back on an era, caught up in its own stoned entropy, and looking back on himself, Lot 49 Redux. You don’t have to have been there; if you’re willing, he’ll take you there.

added by Shortride | editThe Spectator, Michael Carlson (Jul 29, 2009)

So here, quite unexpectedly, only a year or so after the publication of Against the Day, a fiction colossal at the very least in size, is another Pynchon novel. The good news is that Inherent Vice is an honorable effort indeed, and shall we say, quite Pynchonian.

added by Shortride | editThe Second Pass, Will Blythe (Jul 29, 2009)

[A]s with Chandler's infamously impossible-to-follow plots, sleuthing the case is hardly the point of Inherent Vice. Savor it instead for Pynchonian linguistic flights and slapstick set pieces. But the nicest surprise of all is the heart-on-sleeve wistfulness that finally peeks through the comic riffing,...The new Pynchon: a beach read and a heartstring puller. It's almost surreal.

added by Shortride | editEntertainment Weekly, Sean Howe (Jul 28, 2009)

Some of the comedy is very funny, and Pynchon’s novel is also full of superb dialogue and lovely descriptive passages that show that, at 72, the outstanding gifts that led in the 1960s and 1970s to comparisons with Joyce and Melville have not deserted him. Gone, though, are the discipline and cohesion of his early fiction. It’s a sad irony that a novel whose analysis of Reagan’s California seems to centre on forces (business, law enforcement, violence) being out of control should itself have so marked a control problem.

added by Shortride | editThe Sunday Times, John Dugdale (Jul 26, 2009)

Inherent Vice is Pynchon on an idiosyncratic frolic, and what a joy it is. He is the only truly Dickensian talent of our time.

added by Shortride | editScotland on Sunday, Stuart Kelly (Jul 26, 2009)

[I]t is probably Pynchon's most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale. And although I couldn't now reconstruct who did what to whom or why, well, no one involved in making The Big Sleep knew who killed the chauffeur either.

added by Shortride | editThe Observer, Sarah Churchwell (Jul 26, 2009)

Unlike much of Pynchon’s other work, Inherent Vice wears its learning lightly, intermixing it with dialogue that zings, jokes that never overstay their welcome and a stream of hilariously bad puns and wickedly acute observations. Who would have thought it? One of America’s most wilful and obscure writers has produced the most enjoyable beach read of the summer.

added by Shortride | editThe Daily Telegraph, Tim Martin (Jul 24, 2009)

As a detective novel, Inherent Vice, though vivid and entertaining, isn't in the first league of such books; nor is it as authentic an insider's product of the psychedelic Sixties as, say, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is minor Pynchon, but it is the perfect entry point into his work for a new generation of readers.

added by Shortride | editThe Times, Aravind Adiga (Jul 23, 2009)

Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon’s developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition—yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he’s more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity’s Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific.

added by Shortride | editPublishers Weekly (Jul 22, 2009)

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Inherent Vice [2015 film] by Paul Thomas Anderson

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Series (with order)

Canonical title

Inherent Vice

Original title

Inherent Vice

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2009

People/Characters

Larry "Doc" Sportello

Important places

Los Angeles, California, USA

Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Ojai, California, USA

Important events

COINTELPRO

Related movies

Inherent Vice (2014 ∙ IMDb)

Awards and honors

New York Times bestseller (Fiction, 2009)

Amazon's Best Books of the Year: 2009 (#94)

Village Voice 25 Favorite Books (2009)

Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year (Fiction, 2009)

Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay Nominee (2014)

Epigraph

Under the paving-stones, the beach! Graffito, Paris, May 1968

Dedication

First words

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.

Quotations

The clock up on the wall, which reminded Doc of elementary school back in San Joaquin, read some hour that it could not possibly be. Doc waited for the hands to move, but they didn't, from which he deduced that the clock ws broken and maybe had been for years. Which was groovy however because long ago Sortilège had taught him the esoteric skill of telling time from a broken clock. The first thing you had to do was light a joint, which in the Hall of Justice might seem odd, but surely not way back here--who knew, maybe even outside the jurisdiction of local drug enforcement--though just to be on the safe side he also lit a De Nobili cigar and filled the room with a precautionary cloud of smoke from the classic Mafia favorite. After inhaling posmoke for a while, he glanced up at the clock, and sure enough, it showed a different time now, though this could also be from Doc having forgotten where the hands were to begin with. (p.282-283)

The bars hadn't closed yet, and Denis didn't seem to be home. Keeping an ear out for funseekers in the vicinity, Doc brought the carton with the heroin inside it down into the remains of Denis's living room and hid it behind a section of collapsed ciling, draping the giant plastic rag of what had been Chico's water bed over it. Only then did he happen to notice that the carton he'd pulled out of that dumpster in the dark had once helf a twenty-five-inch color TV set, a detail he had no cause to think about till next day when he dropped in on Denis about luchtime and found him sitting, to all appearances serious and attentive, in front of the professionally packaged heroin, now out of its box, and staring at it, as it turned out he'd been doing for some time.

"It said on the box it was a television set," Denis explained.

"And you couldn't resist. Didn't you check first to see if there was something you could plug in?"

"Well I couldn't find any power cord, man, but I figured it could be some new type of set you didn't need one?"

"Uh huh and what . . ." why was he pursuing this? "were you watching, when I came in?"

"See, my theory is, is it's one of those educational channels? A little slow maybe, but no worse than high school . . ."

"Yes Denis thanks, I will just have a hit off of that if you don't mind. . . ."

"And dig it, Doc, if you watch long enough . . . see how it begins to sort of . . . change?"

Alarmingly, Doc after a minute or two did find minute modulations of color and light intensity beginning to appear among the tightly taped layers of plastic. He sat down next to Denis, and they passed the roach back and forth, eyes glued to the package. Jade/Ashley showed up with a giant Thermos full of Orange Julius and paper cups and a bag of Cheetos.

"Lunch," she greeted them, "and color-coordinated, too, and-- Whoa, what the fuck is that, it looks like smack."

"Nah," said Denis, "I think it's like a . . . documentary?"

They all sat there in a row, sipping, crunching, and gazing. Finally Doc tore himself away. "I hate to be the bad guy, but I've got to do a repo on this?"

"Just till this part's over?"

"Till we see what happens," added Jade.

(p.339-340)

Last words

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original title: Inherent Vice

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Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

Adiga, Aravind

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Wikipedia in English (2)

Inherent Vice

The Big Bounce (1969 film)

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Reluctantly investigating a kidnapping threat against his ex-girlfriend's billionaire beau, Doc Sportello tackles a bizarre tangle of nefarious characters before stumbling on a mysterious entity that may actually be a tax shelter for a dental group.

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