Inherent Vice review New York Magazine

[Robin Landseadel]

Why would The New Yorker assign films to Pauline Kael that they knew  
she would hate? Because Kael on a caustic verbal tear was more  
entertaining than just about any other expression of schadenfreude.  
Sam Anderson is quite illuminating and articulate in his screed:

	. . .I should not, probably, hate Thomas Pynchon. He is an
	indisputably, uniquely gifted genius who shares artistic DNA with
	almost all my favorite writers (Joyce, Barthelme, DeLillo, et al).
	Basic demographics and taste-algorithms suggest, in fact, that I
	should be a full-fledged Pynchon groupie, the kind of guy who
	names all his hamsters Slothrop and slaps W.A.S.T.E. stickers on
	the windows of his local post office. But I can’t help it. My distaste
	is visceral, involuntary, and preconscious—a spasm of my
	aesthetic immune system. . .

	(Some critics have detected a new human warmth in Inherent Vice
	—but that’s only by contrast, the way a walk-in refrigerator feels
	warm when you’ve just spent a month in a walk-in freezer.)

I may not agree with Sam Anderson but I defend the right of Mr.  
Anderson to express his dislikes in such a coherent fashion.

On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:40 PM, Robert Mahnke wrote:

> Why would a magazine assign a review to a writer who professes a  
> visceral hatred of the author?  That's just a waste of everyone's  
> time.
>
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net 
> > wrote:
> Sam Anderson hates Inherent Vice with lots of energy, verve and  
> knowledge:
>
>        Incoherent ViceMy Thomas Pynchon problem.
>        Add a Comment
>        • By Sam Anderson
>        • Published Aug 2, 2009
>
>        This is probably going to make me sound, yet again, like a
>        Neanderthal shouting from the back of the classroom, and might
>        even destroy my career and end a few friendships and scandalize
>        my children and cast shame upon my ancestors—but I have
>        something to confess. After years of deceiving myself and  
> others
>        (felonious head nods in grad seminars, forced cocktail-party
>        chuckles), I have decided it’s time to stop living a literary- 
> critical
>        lie. There is no easy way to say this, so here it is. I hate  
> Thomas
>        Pynchon.
>
> http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/58182/
>