Inherent Vice: review from Austin

[Robin Landseadel]

BOOKS

Review: Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice'
By Jeff Severs
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 02, 2009

Where are you at, man?"

That's the question the hippies and dopers of Thomas Pynchon's new  
novel, "Inherent Vice," repeatedly ask each other. Which side are you  
on? Can I trust you? "No," Pynchon answers loudly in this grim book,  
which shows the utopian dreams of the 1960s dissolving in a haze of  
informants, dirty policing and unchecked betrayal.

But no, really, where are you at, man? The setting is 1970 Los  
Angeles, but in Pynchon's hands the question refers to something "more- 
than-geographical." Might some other America be possible, with enough  
collective commitment or hallucinogenic drugs? Nearly every Pynchon  
novel is about what he calls a "subjunctive America," the more  
innocent nation that, in the historical moments his books cover, got  
away. "Inherent Vice" probes this idea through tales of acid trips to  
other planets, a sunken continent named Lemuria that might rise again,  
and, on the more practical side, a corrupt suburban developer who's  
kidnapped before he can finish building a commune of sorts in the Las  
Vegas desert. . .



http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/2009/08/02/0802pynchon.html