Inherent Vice: Beach Reads

[Robin Landseadel]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Elaine Bell<elainemmbell at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> So I decided to go get my Barnes&Noble copy of IV after noon
> yesterday,hoping to catch the Pynchon fanatica gathering round
> the Starbucks fires during their lunch hours.  Also, concerned for
> my safety should the crush get too rough, I suited up for battle:
> Jimmy Choo stilettos, LBD, shades, a parasol and my copy of ATD
> for a shield or cudgel as necessary. On arrival, there it was:
> DIRECTLY in front of the entrance doors in all of its green and
> magenta glory, smackdabcenter of a table bannered:  SUMMER
> READING! What hardy reader could have ever envisioned such a
> Pynchon placement. (Yeh, right there with the latest Charlene
> Harris, Dead Until Dawn and a cute little mini-beach-chair that
> could hold your book cleverly in place while your hands remained
> free to coppertone yourself and sip at your banana colada.)

Wrote a 700 word review of Inherent Vice for the local arts and  
activities newspaper. My focus was on those aspects of Inherent Vice  
that make it a "Beach Read." I picked up my copy at the Borders where  
I used to work, The store was essentially empty save for a few coffee  
drinkers and employees. The stock was low—the CD section is now one- 
twentieth the size it once was, back when that was my department, back  
when people bought music instead of burning it, back in the days when  
the I-Pod and Napster just started to creep in, when the number one  
record on the Billboard charts sold a million copies instead of 87,000  
"units."

Elsewhere on the list the element of work is noted as central in  
Pynchon's writing. My work was in a bookstore and a lot of that work  
was shifting the summer's beach reads—Mystery, Romance, "Chick Lit",  
and other genres—from the store's back door into a massive warehouse,  
to the front of store display, with discount stickers, to the shelves  
in the sections, then off those shelves to be returned for credit [out  
the back door] and then back again [through the back door] as  
remaindered items to be sold at a discount between 75% to 90% off the  
original retail price. The whole point was to get those books out the  
front door without setting off alarms. Some of those remaindered titles 
—like all those copies of Mason & Dixon—simply had a single line from  
a broad, black permanent marker on the bottoms of the pages and  
through the UPC on the back, some had bright red, orange or pink  
remainder spray on the inside flaps. Part of the "work" commentary  
built into Inherent Vice is a sly aside about the decline and fall of  
the big-box book store and the infrastructure that goes along with  
"Mall Culture."

Consider Penguin's promo video, virally marketed among obsessive  
fanboys such as I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U

Now look a a typical ad for a beach read or trailer for some mid- 
summer, violence-packed big ticket Hollywood Action Thriller promising  
catharsis through violence. The Penguin trailer is the opposite,  
dreamy and slow and kinda weird and unresolved. But it's still  
marketing to one of the emerging fan-bases.