Inherent Vice Review, Dallas Morning News

[Robin Landseadel]

Book review: 'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, August 23, 2009

By JOHN FREEMAN / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

John Freeman is acting editor of Granta and author of The Tyranny of E- 
mail, forthcoming from Scribner.

California used to mean something. Not just Arnold Schwarzenegger and  
the epicenter of pornography, or Kobe and Shaq and the occasional  
backdraft of Beat era memorabilia. California was where things  
happened that simply couldn't happen elsewhere in America because  
there, as Joan Didion put it, "beneath that immense bleached sky, is  
where we run out of continent."

Based on what little we know of his life, Thomas Pynchon probably  
spent some time in California, looking into the abyss of its high blue  
skies. He also wrote two books about it: The Crying of Lot 49, his  
manic satire of a revenge story; andVineland, the most political novel  
to come out of the 1980s, the book that examined what a decade of  
greed had done to America.

In his zany new novel, Inherent Vice, Pynchon goes to the Golden State  
again, tunneling back to the early 1970s, to paint a nostalgic  
portrait of a fictional beach town north of LA. Here, the  
counterculture has lost out to the forces of control, governmental  
power and, well, sobriety.

Private dicks usually spend most of their time in the cups. Larry  
"Doc" Sportello, the diminutive, ponytailed PI who narrates this  
novel, tumbles through its story in a doper's haze. There is hardly a  
scene in which he is not puffing, toking or jonesing for a joint. He  
is so hooked crooked, that cops try to pay him off with pot.

But he does, amid the fog of skunky smoke, have a moral center. So  
when his ex-girlfriend comes to him with word that her lover is about  
to get whacked, Doc decides to investigate. He pulls one thread, and  
200 others unravel to reveal the messy weave of 1970s Los Angeles  
beach life.

Pynchon has always been a bit of a naturalist when it comes to  
plotting a story. Anything and everything goes in. And so novels such  
as Against the Day, his 1,200-page recent zeppelin of a novel, keep  
all but the most maniacally intelligent readers scrabbling after them,  
chasing their shadows.

Inherent Vice is no different. This may be a 370-page slapstick noir,  
but to keep it all in your head, you'll need to remember the identity  
of biker gang members, massage parlor hookers, bent cops, straight  
cops, shady developers, gamblers, motorheads, bartenders, gay Vietnam  
war veterans, new-age gurus, Doc's doper friends and the edgier beach  
punk bands they all worship.

There's an untidy muchness to this universe that is about to be wiped  
out; at least that's what Doc fears. The developers and politicians  
and people in power don't want this ideological miscegenation, don't  
want dopers and vets and Mexicans living atop one another on the  
beach. They want to create steadily rising home values and vacuum- 
packed suburban happiness.

Or maybe that's just Doc and everyone else's paranoia kicking in. With  
all the dope they're smoking, everything and anything seems like a  
possible conspiracy.

"Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a  
channel to something they didn't want us to see?" says one character,  
messing around on the computer in the bowels of the early Internet.

Inherent Vice would seem like a cartoon of those times, were it not  
all so true. Indeed, Southern California has become a developer's  
paradise. Orange County is one of the most conservative parts of  
America. It's impossible to tune in, turn on and drop out, because  
even on the beach, which is now as polluted as ever, people are  
plugged in to the mainframe. Amusingly, wistfully, Inherent Vice  
reminds us it wasn't always so.

John Freeman is acting editor of Granta and author of The Tyranny of E- 
mail, forthcoming from Scribner.

books at dallasnews.com



http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-bk_pynchon_0823gd.ART.State.Edition1.4baca64.html