Inherent Vice review New York Magazine

[Henry Musikar]

I have read other reviews of books or movies in which the critic admitted,
or all but admitted to not liking the author of the work, and I've always
wondered at the motivation, both of the editors who assigned those critics,
and of the critics themselves.  Why would you continue to partake of
different preparation of a dish that you dislike, or by a chef whose cooking
you find unpleasant, when there are so many others to try?

This case is different, however.  The public at large has been given the
impression that this is a Pynchon book, no... the Pynchon book that anyone
who enjoys reading will enjoy reading, and so it merits some number of
skeptical reviews such as the one by Anderson.

Henry Mu
Sr. IT Consultant
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/  

-----Original Message-----
From: 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