Inherent Vice review: Bookforum

[Robin Landseadel]

Paul La Farge has a great opening salvo:

	Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel, follows so
	quickly on the heels of his sixth, the massive Against the Day
	(2006), that the teams of specialists who go over the fuselage of
	every Pynchon text as if it were a spy plane forced down by
	mechanical difficulties, identifying the probable origin and function
	 of each part, writing up the results in Pynchon Notes or on the
	Internet, must be gnashing their teeth with weariness. The red
	telephone again? Aw, sheesh. If only there were some way to
	persuade them not to worry! 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. . .

http://www.bookforum.com/review/4216