Inherent Vice Review, Columbus Dispatch

[Robin Landseadel]

Margaret Quamme pours on the hate-orade:

	FICTION INHERENT VICE
	Biggest mystery here: Why publish this?
	Sunday,  August 16, 2009 3:17 AM
	BY MARGARET QUAMME
	For The Columbus Dispatch

	Thomas Pynchon made a literary splash in 1973 with the
	massive and intellectually provocative (if barely
	comprehensible) Gravity's Rainbow -- and again in 1997 with
	the equally massive (but more humane) Mason & Dixon.

	He's famous not only for his writing but also for the extent to
	which he guards his privacy: He doesn't grant interviews or
	allow himself to be photographed.

	It would be pleasant to report that his latest novel, Inherent Vice,
	adds to his reputation, but it doesn't.

	It's tempting to speculate that the novel was published simply
	because Pynchon's name is attached to it.

	Set in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Inherent Vice is a shaggy-
	dog parody of the mystery genre.

	Perpetually stoned private investigator Doc Sportello stumbles
	around in southern California, with a side trip to Las Vegas,
	trying to account for the disappearance of real-estate developer
	 Mickey Wolfmann. Mickey was connected to the mysterious
	Golden Fang, alternately explained as a schooner retrofitted to
	smuggle heroin or a "shadowy holding company" for
	disreputable dentists.

	The mystery is sort of solved, to nobody's complete satisfaction.
	The good guys turn out to be surfers and druggies; the bad 	
	guys, inevitably, are cops, federal agents and developers.

	This has all been done before, and better: Imagine a musty
	merger of Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Robert Altman's
	The Long Goodbye. The novel finds tired jokes in the notion
	that someday people will carry phones around with them and
	communicate via computer.

	The word groovy -- which had worn out its welcome long before
	the '60s did -- appears with annoying frequency, as do
	references to old movies, each with its release date in
	parentheses, and silly parodies of old rock songs.

	The combination of green and magenta recurs dozens of times
	in various contexts.

	"What does it mean, man?" one might ask -- or even "Who
	cares?"

	Much of the novel is given to recapping what Doc, whose
	"stoner's memory" often gets the best of him, does or doesn't
	know about the case. Doc's dreams and acid trips, in which he
	voyages to a lost Eden sunk beneath the Pacific, are explored
	in detail.

	Most of the rest of the novel is devoted to the sexual proclivities
	of what Pynchon refers to as stewardii and the other miniskirted,
	underwear-averse denizens of Doc's fevered, half-fantasized
	world.

	The novel might make somebody, somewhere, nostalgic for the
	'60s; but it's more likely to inspire the wish that Pynchon had let
	the decade rest in peace.

	• (Penguin, 369 pages, $27.95) by Thomas Pynchon