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Loading... Inherent Viceby Thomas Pynchon
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Shaggy dog noir, magical realist and postmodern, along with a healthy dose of SoCal 70s burnout culture. Charles Manson is referenced quite a bit, along with a panoply of musical allusions, both real and made-up. Later Pynchon is fun to read, mainly because he has dropped a lot of his po-faced experimentalism and just lets his overactive brain take over. It all can be a bit confusing (or trippy) as the Inherent Vice has an extensive cast list, and the plot structure reads as a lot of stoned digressions. The reader learns, however, not to underestimate the druggy losers on the fringes of society, and not overestimate the straight men who are supposedly in charge. This was the first Pynchon I've ever read, and it leaves me wanting to read more. Occasionally hilarious, frequently wacky. At several odd points in the book it seemed as if the fabric of reality was giving way to the main character's hallucinations (and perhaps it did?) which added an undertone of the absurd and uncanny to the book.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Has the adaptationInspired
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Pynchon's funniest and I think most accessible book. But it's driven by the same themes as his others — the animus of the Elect toward the Preterite, the entrenchment and corrupting essence of power, and the everyday instances of grace and humor that constitute a disorganized resistance. Pynchon's lens in IV is the "long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq's neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates": colonizations and usurpations and repossession and redevelopment. Doc navigates these disputed spaces in a haze of marijuanasmoke, the ultimate stoner P.I., trusting to intuition and happenstance to make some kind of sense out of the chaos.
Maybe it's because I've seen the movie four or five times since I first read this, but it actually mostly made sense this time around. Having some idea at least what was going on, I was able to chill and absorb the warmth of the writing, the radiant affection the novel has for its setting, mingled with longing for what might be and might have been. Lemuria symbolizes this lost Pacific Eden, dormant under the water like the lagan, the contraband submerged for later retrieval by the schooner Golden Fang and other dubious vessels. Sortilège is Lemuria's chief channeler:
But, thinks Doc to himself later,
Sprinkled in, too, are ironically and characteristically Pynchonian foreshadowings, as Aunt Reet the realtor prophecies realtor.com in an early scene, and Fritz futzes with the nascent ARPAnet in aid of Doc's investigations ("...any excuse to feel like I'm surfin the wave of the future here..."). But Doc can see what's up: "so when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz? [...] Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?" Wolfmann's Channel View Estates are well named, honoring the "toobfreex" Doc meets in a Vegas motel and presaging, too, YouTube's ubiquity.
Like all great L.A. stories, IV is full of weather too, the Santa Anas messing with the dope-addled denizens of Gordita Beach like so:
Palms beating together, louvered light, a downpour — ingredients sufficient on their own for me to love a book. ( )