Inherent Vice review, Fresno Undercurrent

[Robin Landseadel]

This is a review of "Inherent Vice" that I wrote for a local paper:

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Farewell My Lovely

Those that know, know the writing of Thomas Pynchon can be a rough row  
to hoe—featuring convoluted, paranoid plotting, Byzantine sentence  
structure, alternation of genres and modes of presentation within a  
single opus—sometimes even a single page—funny names and multi-layered  
puns, revisionist history and anachronisms galore. And pizza—plenty of  
pizza. What most folks who’ve read Pynchon expect is a rough but  
rewarding time decrypting encoded messages pointing to vast  
conspiracies both right and left, and being able to pat themselves on  
the back for being so wickedly erudite as to be able to follow at  
least some of the multiple, overlapping plotlines found within each of  
his six novels. Those that don’t know Thomas Pynchon usually bail out  
on page 150 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

But note this down and burn this deep into your collective forebrains— 
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh and funniest novel, is a beach  
read.

The grand master of literary obfuscation actually did it this time— 
either he made a conscious decision to express himself via  
comparatively stable characters and plotline of a more traditional  
make & model or he said “screw it—it’s time to cash in!” Inherent Vice  
has sentence structures and vocabulary more akin to Tom Robbins than  
Henry James, an overall shape more akin to Christopher Buckley than  
Henry Adams. You'll knock this one back like chugging down a Corona  
during a Fresno mid-summer heat-wave. Inherent Vice is cool and  
refreshing and funnier and easier to comprehend than anything else  
Pynchon’s written so far.

While many readers of Inherent Vice will note the resonances to The  
Big Lebowski, & some to the Robert Altman/Elliott Gould "Long Goodbye”— 
fewer still recalling "Nick Danger, Third Eye" and an even more  
miniscule slice of that demographic recalling Bonzo Dog Band’s “Big  
Shot”—the key element connecting all these works is Raymond Chandler.  
If any writing of the last 100 years deserves James Wood’s Lit-Crit  
damning-with-faint-praise pejorative "Hysterical Realism," it's  
Chandler's Noir with Literary Pretensions. The mid-sixties satirical  
creation of the Stoned Detective/Hippie as embodied by Nick Danger is  
actually an alternate [call it Po-Mo if it makes you feel more  
comfortable] reading of Raymond Chandler, one that focuses more on the  
actual words on the page, as opposed to somebody else's words on the  
page or dialog from the movie versions of the books or something  
somebody picked up from a college course. No-one ever did the Stoned  
Detective better than Raymond Chandler did in his original,  
unexpurgated, Hays-Office-disapproved, three sheets to the wind in  
Copenhagen, wasted beyond recognition, ripped-to-the tits originals.  
It was a target so big, so obvious, so theatrical, so inherently comic  
it was never a question of "If" Pynchon would take Raymond Chandler at  
his word and simply "Do It," come up with his own tattered casebook  
full of old time-radio sound effects, his own Pulp Fiction.  It was  
only a question of "when?" The Firesigns, the Coens and Altman 'n  
Gould were all making variations, comments and carom shots off of  
Chandler's high-gloss pulp. As does Pynchon.

The nominal Dame of these stories, usually a lady who’s doing her best  
to reinvent herself with a different haircut, clothes, identity,  
address—is THE figure at the core of Noir. In Inherent Vice, that  
“Dame” is Shasta, ex-girlfriend of hazy P.I. and protagonist Doc  
Sportello—a L.A. beauty queen who wanted to make it big in the movies  
but settled for less from her rich, married-to-someone-else real- 
estate-mogul boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann. Wolfmann has been kidnapped  
in the immediate wake of the Tate-LaBianca Murders, leading to many a  
nervous mishap among hypersensitive members of the L.A.P.D. and  
multiple homicides. Naturally, as in Raymond Chandler’s Pulp Fictions,  
things get really complicated real fast and the rot leads all the way  
to the top of L.A.’s food chain. The deeper symbolism of Shasta can be  
spotted by anyone who knows what Pynchon was writing about in Vineland— 
Hippie Heaven—and all this property management is doing a major number  
on someone who used to be one fine hippie chick. By the time you’ve  
zipped through Inherent Vice’s 369 pages, you’ll probably want to  
start all over again. The author’s name on the cover changes nothing.  
This is still a beach read.

Who'd 'a thunk it?