Inherent Vice Review, Columbus Dispatch

[Page]

Let me clarify the review by Ms. Quamme. The Columbus Dispatch is a 
ridiculous and worthless rag. The only people who read it as a source of 
truth and illumination are the same people who would accept this review as 
informative and accurate. In other words, idiots.

I grew up in Columbus -- which I do not recommend -- and know the failings 
of The Dispatch first hand.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2009 1:39 PM
Subject: Inherent Vice Review, Columbus Dispatch


> Margaret Quamme pours on the hate-orade:
>
> FICTION INHERENT VICE
> Biggest mystery here: Why publish this?
> Sunday,  August 16, 2009 3:17 AM
> BY MARGARET QUAMME
> For The Columbus Dispatch
>
> Thomas Pynchon made a literary splash in 1973 with the
> massive and intellectually provocative (if barely
> comprehensible) Gravity's Rainbow -- and again in 1997 with
> the equally massive (but more humane) Mason & Dixon.
>
> He's famous not only for his writing but also for the extent to
> which he guards his privacy: He doesn't grant interviews or
> allow himself to be photographed.
>
> It would be pleasant to report that his latest novel, Inherent Vice,
> adds to his reputation, but it doesn't.
>
> It's tempting to speculate that the novel was published simply
> because Pynchon's name is attached to it.
>
> Set in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Inherent Vice is a shaggy-
> dog parody of the mystery genre.
>
> Perpetually stoned private investigator Doc Sportello stumbles
> around in southern California, with a side trip to Las Vegas,
> trying to account for the disappearance of real-estate developer
> Mickey Wolfmann. Mickey was connected to the mysterious
> Golden Fang, alternately explained as a schooner retrofitted to
> smuggle heroin or a "shadowy holding company" for
> disreputable dentists.
>
> The mystery is sort of solved, to nobody's complete satisfaction.
> The good guys turn out to be surfers and druggies; the bad
> guys, inevitably, are cops, federal agents and developers.
>
> This has all been done before, and better: Imagine a musty
> merger of Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Robert Altman's
> The Long Goodbye. The novel finds tired jokes in the notion
> that someday people will carry phones around with them and
> communicate via computer.
>
> The word groovy -- which had worn out its welcome long before
> the '60s did -- appears with annoying frequency, as do
> references to old movies, each with its release date in
> parentheses, and silly parodies of old rock songs.
>
> The combination of green and magenta recurs dozens of times
> in various contexts.
>
> "What does it mean, man?" one might ask -- or even "Who
> cares?"
>
> Much of the novel is given to recapping what Doc, whose
> "stoner's memory" often gets the best of him, does or doesn't
> know about the case. Doc's dreams and acid trips, in which he
> voyages to a lost Eden sunk beneath the Pacific, are explored
> in detail.
>
> Most of the rest of the novel is devoted to the sexual proclivities
> of what Pynchon refers to as stewardii and the other miniskirted,
> underwear-averse denizens of Doc's fevered, half-fantasized
> world.
>
> The novel might make somebody, somewhere, nostalgic for the
> '60s; but it's more likely to inspire the wish that Pynchon had let
> the decade rest in peace.
>
> • (Penguin, 369 pages, $27.95) by Thomas Pynchon
>


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