Inherent Vice Review, TimesOnline

[Robin Landseadel]

Fine Arabian Stuff from Paul Quinn at Timesonline


	. . . Los Angeles is the quintessential city of film noir, but here
	Pynchon saturates the usually monochrome imagery with
	psychedelic colours, lurid greens and magentas. His story is set
	at the dawn of the 1970s, after the Manson murders, when
	recent dreams of liberty and revolution are being destroyed in a
	climate of fear and oppression. The hero is Doc Sportello, the
	hippie proprietor of LSD (Location, Surveillance, Detection)
	Investigations, and an incorrigible pot-head. The prodigious
	quantities of weed consumed by Doc and his beach buddies
	provide a bathetic and comic motivation for the hallucinatory
	episodes and paranoiac obsessions that elsewhere in
	Pynchon’s writing have more serious epistemological
	implications. Here, Ouija boards and mind-altering substances
	account for resurfacing visions of the sunken continent of
	Lemuria. When stoned, Doc’s friend, the marine lawyer
	Sauncho Smilax, is given to over-anxious exegesis of
	everything from the ontological significance of the transition
	from black-and-white to colour in The Wizard of Oz, to the
	allegorical nature of a cartoon advertisment featuring Charlie
	the tuna, who willingly entangles himself in fishermen’s nets:
	“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes he
	wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can,
	you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep
	parable of consumer capitalism . . .”. Pynchon’s comic riffs and
	casual allusions are never just that: the whole novel is deeply
	concerned with entanglement and extrication. . .

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6744540.ece