Inherent Vice review, Newsweek

[Robin Landseadel]

	No one will ever accuse Pynchon of wearing his feelings on his

	sleeve, but inInherent Vice there's no mistaking his affection for

	his private detective, Larry (Doc) Sportello. Using Chandler

	territory as inspiration, Pynchon launches a tale as complicated

	as anything he's ever written, a tale that involves rotten cops, a

	missing girlfriend, a murdered developer, and a sinister

	menace called the Golden Fang, which is a mysterious

	schooner used for smuggling, but also the name of a shadowy

	holding company and maybe even a Southeast Asian heroin

	cartel. There are times when the false starts, red herrings, dead

	ends, and duplicities get so tangled that all a reader can think of

	is the story about Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, who, in the midst

	of writing the screenplay for The Big Sleep, had to call up

	Chandler to ask who killed the chauffeur—and he couldn't

	remember either.

	An uncurbed reflex for complication is not all Pynchon shares

	with Chandler. Both men wrote about paradise lost, with Los

	Angeles as exhibit A. Both Doc and Marlowe are loners and

	outsiders. In several ways, Chandler's greatest novel, The Long

	Goodbye, a sad, beautiful book about friendship betrayed, is

	the template for Inherent Vice. But Pynchon's clearest link with

	Chandler is a love of language. His rococo stoner dialogue is

	the equivalent of Chandler's fondness for tortured similes. You

	can pick up a Chandler or Pynchon novel, open it anywhere

	and get lost in the wordplay. Pynchon's prose is so casually

	vernacular, so deeply in the American grain, you forget that

	someone composed it. Inherent Vice feels fizzily spontaneous

	—like a series of jazz solos, scenes, and conversations built

	around little riffs of language. Does it add up? Maybe. Do you

	get lost? Lured down a long linguistic dark alley is more like it.

	It's always weird but always fun.

	In one of his many throwaway set pieces, Pynchon gives Doc

	an aria of disgust at a trend just then getting traction: the

	transition on television and in movies from dramas starring

	private eyes to shows and movies where cops are the heroes.

	 "Once there were all these great old PIs—Philip Marlowe, Sam

	Spade, the shamus of shamuses Johnny Staccato, always

	smarter and more professional than the cops, always end up

	solvin the crime while the cops are followin wrong leads and

	gettin in the way…But nowadays it's all you see anymore is

	cops, the tube is saturated with f---in cop shows, just being

	regular guys, only tryin to do their jobs, folks, no more threat to

	nobody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the

	viewer population so cop-happy they're beggin to be run in.

	Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it

	please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett." Pynchon doesn't

	spell it out, but that passage is his noir obituary. The whole

	foundation of noir is the alienation of its heroes; alienated

	insiders, antiheroes with badges and medical plans, that's a

	stretch. Or was. Isn't Jimmy McNulty on The Wire really closer

	kin to Marlowe and Spade than Joe Friday? Maybe

	contemporary life has eroded individualism, which would seem

	to be Pynchon's larger point. That doesn't mean the world we

	live in is any less shadowed or less complicated. More likely,

	noir has just expanded its territory to include cops and crooks

	and all those so-called innocent bystanders caught in the

	crossfire. Noir isn't a genre any longer. It's claimed its place as

	one of the twin strands of our cultural DNA, the dark side of the

	American Dream.