IVIV reception: See Magazine "surfing the final wave of hippiedom in southern California"

[Doug Millison]

http://www.seemagazine.com/article/arts/arts-feature/vice0827/

Pynchon Does Lebowski A pothead private eye uncovers a labyrinthine  
conspiracy (what else?) in Inherent Vice
Published August 27, 2009  by Clara Loginov in Arts Feature


INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press. 369 pp. $35.
In 2003, Thomas Pynchon came out of reclusiveness just long enough to  
lend his voice to two guest spots, playing himself, on The Simpsons.  
It was a perplexing move, considering the prolific author has never  
been interviewed, and some of his most recent known photographs are  
from his high school yearbook. In one of the episodes, “Diatribe of a  
Mad Housewife,” cartoon Pynchon, wearing a bag over his head,  
contributes the following blurb for the flap of Marge’s novel: “Here’s  
your quote. Thomas Pynchon loved this book. Almost as much as he loves  
cameras.” We’ll never know exactly why he chose to do the show, but my  
guess is because it was hilarious.

Pynchon’s latest book, Inherent Vice, is a similarly perplexing  
exploit: At 369 pages, it’s a relatively jaunty follow-up to 2006’s  
Against the Day, a 1,085-page meditation on ... okay, I don’t know.  
Eleven hundred pages! And it has math in it! (I didn’t read it.) But  
beyond its brevity, Vice is uncharacteristic for Pynchon because it’s  
a pulpy noir detective story. Also because it’s a psychedelic stoner  
comedy. Maybe Pynchon’s been reading Raymond Chandler and watching  
Cheech and Chong movies, but since the odds of him ever granting  
anyone an interview are, well, nil, we’ll never know exactly where  
this one came from.

Larry “Doc” Sportello is a private investigator (a “gumsandal” — he  
wears huarache sandals and an ankle holster) and a pothead, surfing  
the final wave of hippiedom in southern California. The year is 1970,  
chosen because Charles Manson’s presence hangs in the air as  
justification for paranoia and fear of all things free and communal.  
Like any good noir, this one begins with a visit and a request from a  
beautiful woman — namely, Shasta Fey, an ex-girlfriend of Doc’s, who’s  
of course more beach bunny than femme fatale. She asks Doc to get to  
the bottom of a scheme to have her lover, a real estate mogul,  
committed to an insane asylum.

The plot, as Pynchon plots are wont to do, only gets convoluted from  
there, and eventually encompasses everything from heroin cartels to  
tax-evading dentists, Ethel Merman-loving thugs to zombies. A  
characteristically Pynchonian cast of characters (with names like Puck  
Beaverton, Trillium Fortnight, and Denis “whose name everybody  
pronounced to rhyme with ‘penis’”) rounds things out.

Making Vice out to be a big old quirkfest isn’t intended to be a knock  
against the book. It’s the house style with Pynchon, and a connecting  
thread between this and his other works. The unwieldy scenarios are  
his way of demonstrating that human life is messy and entropic: trying  
to make sense of things (social, political, metaphysical, the plot of  
this damn book, etc.) always results in a movement towards greater  
chaos.

Pynchon’s cleverly named but generally poorly developed characters  
have been a point of criticism, but especially here, their cardboard  
nature helps create a milieu of detachment and loss. And by the end,  
Doc shows surprising depth, once the fog of pot smoke has lifted.  
Though before this happens, from the uncomfortable moment he greets a  
black client as “my brother” to the instance he drools in a meeting  
because he’s slipped into reminiscence over a particularly tasty  
cheeseburger, Doc is a buffoon through and through. And his buffoonery  
is the perfect foil for a plot stuffed with too many twists and turns  
to hold the reader’s interest on its own. After all, if the detective  
can’t remember what just happened, why should we?

And as if there weren’t enough going on in this book, framing the  
detective story is a larger, more impenetrable mystery: what the  
future holds. From where we stand, we know that Reaganism, suburban  
housing developments, the Information Age, etc. are on their way, but  
the characters are just waiting “for the fog to burn away, and for  
something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.” I think the  
most telling moment comes when Doc uses an actual Internet prototype,  
the ARPAnet, to find some information he needs, despite his  
colleague’s warning that it “takes souls.” There’s a necessary sadness  
in change, even if we’re prepared. What really makes Inherent Vice  
great is this aching and palpable sadness, and Pynchon, not getting  
too close, is able to capture it beautifully, like a filmmaker finding  
the perfect distance from which to frame his final shot.

Ultimately, though, I still get the sense that Pynchon’s fine with  
someone picking up his book just to laugh at all the oddball jokes.  
There’s a moment where Doc, watching TV in a Vegas hotel room, lands  
on the movie Godzilligan’s Island. You can almost picture (well, maybe  
not picture) Pynchon giggling to himself as he writes this passage, a  
digression which actually includes a recap of a scene in which the  
castaways meet the monster. How does it end? Characteristically, Doc  
falls asleep halfway into the movie and wakes up the next day to  
“Henry Kissinger on the Today show going, ‘Vell, den, ve schould chust  
bombp dem, schouldn’t ve?’”

For my money, at least on first reading, these moments are some of the  
greatest pleasures the book offers: I couldn’t tell you exactly who  
dun what in Inherent Vice, but I can tell you about Godzilligan’s  
Island, and I’m okay with that