Inherent Vice review New York Magazine

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Robin:
 
> Sam Anderson is quite illuminating and articulate in his screed [...]
> I may not agree with Sam Anderson but I defend the right of Mr.
> Anderson to express his dislikes in such a coherent fashion.

Yeah, at least he's honest about hating Pynchon, as opposed to those critics
who try to conceal their hatred under supposedly neutral arguments (James
Wood comes to mind). Nevertheless, I was puzzled by this bit in Sam Anderson's
review:
 
> Pynchon has always been a cartoonist: He specializes in simplification, 
> exaggeration, and brightly colored types. This means that, paradoxically, 
> his wildest invention occurs right at the edge of cliché. He may have finally 
> fallen over that edge. His types, after 45 years, have themselves become types. 
> The characters in Inherent Vice are not only paranoid, they walk around constantly 
> talking about their paranoia. 
 
That final sentence: As though Pynchon's paranoid characters talking about their
paranoia represents some sort of new, clichéd direction in Pynchon's late work.
But they have been doing it all along, especially in Lot 49 and GR! In fact, this
self-consciousness was one of the NEW things about Pynchon's take on paranoia
back in the sixties. World literature before Pynchon is crammed with paranoid
characters - Dostoevsky's Underground Man, for instance, or the governess in
Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw'. Only those characters don't really know
that they're paranoid; that's up to the reader to discover. Whereas Pynchon's
characters have been aware of their paranoia all along, and have spoken of it
at great length, cf. Oedipa's musings about the four different alternatives
she faces toward the end of Lot 49, or Pig's theories of We-systems, They-systems,
and creative paranoia in GR.
 
Tore
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