Inherent Vice review in Buffalo News

[Robin Landseadel]

Jeff Simon really likes Pynchon's latest:

	Going to the beach with Thomas Pynchon
	By Jeff Simon
	NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
	August 02, 2009, 6:03 AM

	Let others work themselves into high dudgeon if they want. Not
	me. I had more fun reading “Inherent Vice” than I’ve had
	reading a Thomas Pynchon novel since I read “V.” in 1963 and
	“The Crying of Lot 49” three years later.

	If, at the age of 72, America’s most reclusive writer and one of
	its most revered novelists wants to edge his merry way into the
	Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald/ James Ellroy business
	with a wildly comic variant of L. A. Noir, private eye and all, I’m
	going to be the last one to hector him for abandoning the
	mammoth historical meditations of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (one of
	the most hosannaed and studied novels of the past half-
	century) and his last book “Against the Day.” Let others rain on
	his parade. I’d rather pick up a glockenspiel and march in it.

	Here we have between covers a very real creature that might
	have been thought as mythical as the Sphinx or the Hippogriff
	— an authentic Thomas Pynchon beach novel, compulsively
	readable and veritably begging for some intrepid soul to talk
	Pynchon into letting him film it.

	Lest anyone think “Inherent Vice” isn’t deeply Pynchonesque
	from its opening sentence (“She came along the alley and up
	the back steps the way she always used to”), you’ll be
	immediately disabused of that notion by going back to his
	amazing first novel “V.,” whose protagonist Benny Profane
	“schlemiel and human yo-yo” is clearly an East Coast
	forerunner of “Inherent Vice’s” Doc Sportello. Pynchon’s new
	protagonist is a short, 1970 hippie and private eye who lives
	near “Gordita” (read Manhattan) beach in L. A. (shades of Jim
	Rockford and Harry Orwell), has long hair, smokes every joint
	he can lay lips on and has no trouble doing a few lines of coke,
	too, just to be sociable.

	In fact, sometimes when Doc is keeping company with a friend
	named Denis, their weedhead badinage has the flavor of a
	Cheech and Chong routine. (In truth, it seems to me a lot
	funnier. This book made me guffaw — often.)

	Time and place are very specific here. The Manson murders (i.
	e. the Tate-LaBianca killings) are still fresh on everyone’s mind
	and about to go to trial; Agnew is still Nixon’s alliterative veep;
	and a huge cache of counterfeit $20 bills with Nixon’s picture
	on them is delightfully absurd but not nearly as ridiculous as it
	would become just a few years later. The Internet is struggling
	mightily to be born. Las Vegas is just starting to replace
	mobsters with Howard Hughes and his Mormons, so that
	America’s Sin City of the desert can become a theme park.

	However much Pynchon — like the Coen Brothers in “The Big
	Lebowski” — is taking from the kind of novels that have been
	written by Chandler or Macdonald or their flamboyant (and
	sometimes Pynchonesque) heir James Ellroy, the game plan
	here isn’t terribly different from “V.” 46 years ago.
	You’ve got the lovably grungy stumblebum world of Doc
	Sportello, full of surfers, ex-girlfriends in bikini bottoms and
	Country Joe and the Fish Sweatshirts, psychedelic surf bands
	called The Boards, and a cop nicknamed Bigfoot, who seems to
	have once had an admirably minor movie career.

	And then you’ve got the marrow-chilling encroachment of
	something called The Golden Fang, which starts out as the
	name of a schooner, turns into an Oriental drug cartel and then
	a lavish California behavioral modification emporium begun by
	a bunch of dentists (charter members of Pynchon’s readership
	will have fond memories of Dr. Eigenvalue’s “psychdontics” in
	“V.”).

	Let us cede now that Pynchon’s richly inventive and
	vehemently esoteric paranoia is as ripe for nostalgia as
	anything else (and more convincingly so than most). At the
	same time, in a post-9/11 world, Pynchon’s fear of conspiracy
	and awe at comic malevolence seem stunningly reasonable in
	the 21st century.

	Remember that Pynchon’s apparently malevolent fantasies
	have had a way of turning into realities just a few years down
	the line. Those of us who read “The Crying of Lot 49” in 1966
	thought the idea of Tristero, his huge fictional alternative mail
	system, a joyfully whacked-out invention by one of our more
	rollicking literary geniuses.

	In 2009, “Inherent Vice” was delivered to our office by UPS, just
	an hour or so after the daily FedEx and DHL mail arrived (while
	the once all-powerful U. S. Postal Service keeps frantically
	raising first-class stamp prices to survive).

	Our story here, then, begins with Doc Sportello’s old flame
	Shasta, who wants Doc to nose around and find out what
	happened to her new boyfriend, a billionaire Angeleno real-
	estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann, who travels with a
	Praetorian guard of Aryan Brotherhood types (the most
	prominent of whom has a near-swooning idolatry of Ethel
	Merman).

	Mickey disappears in a daylight raid on a massage parlor, one
	of his bodyguards is killed and Doc himself is somehow
	knocked unconscious. He is therefore close enough to be
	implicated like any good Philip Marlowe or Jim Rockford of yore
	but, as much of a weedhead as he is, the cops still like him
	because when he isn’t getting stoned, he’s good at what he
	does (actually, he’s good at it even when he is stoned).

	In Pynchon-land, the scruffier and more dubious you are on the
	straight-meter, the more lovable and more decent you’re liable
	to turn out to be. And the higher your tax bracket and the more
	expensive your car and the more official your job, the more
	likely it is you’re in league with God only knows what and for
	Lord knows what reason.

	And while all this is going on, it seems entirely logical to have
	passing references, say, to the lost continent of Limuria, which
	as we all know (?) is the Pacific Ocean version of the lost
	continent of Atlantis.

	From its street geography to its pop cultural faultlines, books
	don’t get more L. A. than “Inherent Vice,” which is vastly more
	entertaining in parody than Pynchon has been for many books
	now.

	Which, of course, doesn’t mean that history and its macro-world
	don’t always overhang ominously indeed on Doc and all his
	scruffy, sophomoric schlemiel friends.

	There is a lot of music referred to on the fly in “Inherent Vice”
	(Pynchon, bless him, once wrote the liner notes to a set
	collecting the best of Spike Jones).

	As Giaocchino Rossini knew in a series of piano pieces he
	wrote in his ’60s and ’70s, one of the more common “sins of old
	age” is a reawakened playful spirit and the desire to have fun.

	Bravo.



http://www.buffalonews.com/185/story/751883.html