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Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
2,969914,616 (3.61)1 / 119
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.
  1. 30
    The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (johnxlibris)
    johnxlibris: Similar feel and locale. Conspiracies abound.
  2. 20
    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
  3. 20
    The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (LamontCranston)
  4. 00
    Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat: The Harry Fannin Detective Novels by David Markson (bertilak)
  5. 12
    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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Group TopicMessagesLast Message 
 Pynchon Pandæmonium: Inherent Vice3 unread / 3paradoxosalpha, August 2022

» See also 119 mentions

English (83)  Dutch (3)  Spanish (2)  Italian (2)  German (1)  All languages (91)
Showing 1-5 of 83 (next | show all)
...and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness... how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.


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:

"I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it's all this rain, but we're starting to have the same dreams. We can't find a way to return to Lemuria, so it's returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean — 'hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain't it..."
"It talked to you guys?"
"I don't know. It isn't just a place."


But, thinks Doc to himself later,

What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they'd been exiled from too long ago to remember.


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:

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...


Palms beating together, louvered light, a downpour — ingredients sufficient on their own for me to love a book. ( )
  yarb | Jan 4, 2024 |
4.65 ( )
  jarrettbrown | Jul 4, 2023 |
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. ( )
  jonbrammer | Jul 1, 2023 |
Like Chandler on LSD. Groovy. ( )
  floppingbunnies | Jun 29, 2023 |
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. ( )
  lukeasrodgers | Jun 25, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 83 (next | show all)
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.
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.
 
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)
 

» Add other authors (34 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Pynchon, Thomasprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Stingl, NikolausTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Under the paving-stones, the beach! Graffito, Paris, May 1968
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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)
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original title: Inherent Vice
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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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