Inherent Vice review, Fresno Undercurrent

[Joe Allonby]

When did you write it and where's the attribution?

Just kidding. Well done.

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 7:28 AM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> This is a review of "Inherent Vice" that I wrote for a local paper:
>
> ====================================================
> Farewell My Lovely
>
> Those that know, know the writing of Thomas Pynchon can be a rough row to
> hoe—featuring convoluted, paranoid plotting, Byzantine sentence structure,
> alternation of genres and modes of presentation within a single
> opus—sometimes even a single page—funny names and multi-layered puns,
> revisionist history and anachronisms galore. And pizza—plenty of pizza. What
> most folks who’ve read Pynchon expect is a rough but rewarding time
> decrypting encoded messages pointing to vast conspiracies both right and
> left, and being able to pat themselves on the back for being so wickedly
> erudite as to be able to follow at least some of the multiple, overlapping
> plotlines found within each of his six novels. Those that don’t know Thomas
> Pynchon usually bail out on page 150 of Gravity’s Rainbow.
>
> But note this down and burn this deep into your collective
> forebrains—Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh and funniest novel, is a
> beach read.
>
> The grand master of literary obfuscation actually did it this time—either he
> made a conscious decision to express himself via comparatively stable
> characters and plotline of a more traditional make & model or he said “screw
> it—it’s time to cash in!” Inherent Vice has sentence structures and
> vocabulary more akin to Tom Robbins than Henry James, an overall shape more
> akin to Christopher Buckley than Henry Adams. You'll knock this one back
> like chugging down a Corona during a Fresno mid-summer heat-wave. Inherent
> Vice is cool and refreshing and funnier and easier to comprehend than
> anything else Pynchon’s written so far.
>
> While many readers of Inherent Vice will note the resonances to The Big
> Lebowski, & some to the Robert Altman/Elliott Gould "Long Goodbye”—fewer
> still recalling "Nick Danger, Third Eye" and an even more miniscule slice of
> that demographic recalling Bonzo Dog Band’s “Big Shot”—the key element
> connecting all these works is Raymond Chandler. If any writing of the last
> 100 years deserves James Wood’s Lit-Crit damning-with-faint-praise
> pejorative "Hysterical Realism," it's Chandler's Noir with Literary
> Pretensions. The mid-sixties satirical creation of the Stoned
> Detective/Hippie as embodied by Nick Danger is actually an alternate [call
> it Po-Mo if it makes you feel more comfortable] reading of Raymond Chandler,
> one that focuses more on the actual words on the page, as opposed to
> somebody else's words on the page or dialog from the movie versions of the
> books or something somebody picked up from a college course. No-one ever did
> the Stoned Detective better than Raymond Chandler did in his original,
> unexpurgated, Hays-Office-disapproved, three sheets to the wind in
> Copenhagen, wasted beyond recognition, ripped-to-the tits originals. It was
> a target so big, so obvious, so theatrical, so inherently comic it was never
> a question of "If" Pynchon would take Raymond Chandler at his word and
> simply "Do It," come up with his own tattered casebook full of old
> time-radio sound effects, his own Pulp Fiction.  It was only a question of
> "when?" The Firesigns, the Coens and Altman 'n Gould were all making
> variations, comments and carom shots off of Chandler's high-gloss pulp. As
> does Pynchon.
>
> The nominal Dame of these stories, usually a lady who’s doing her best to
> reinvent herself with a different haircut, clothes, identity, address—is THE
> figure at the core of Noir. In Inherent Vice, that “Dame” is Shasta,
> ex-girlfriend of hazy P.I. and protagonist Doc Sportello—a L.A. beauty queen
> who wanted to make it big in the movies but settled for less from her rich,
> married-to-someone-else real-estate-mogul boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann.
> Wolfmann has been kidnapped in the immediate wake of the Tate-LaBianca
> Murders, leading to many a nervous mishap among hypersensitive members of
> the L.A.P.D. and multiple homicides. Naturally, as in Raymond Chandler’s
> Pulp Fictions, things get really complicated real fast and the rot leads all
> the way to the top of L.A.’s food chain. The deeper symbolism of Shasta can
> be spotted by anyone who knows what Pynchon was writing about in
> Vineland—Hippie Heaven—and all this property management is doing a major
> number on someone who used to be one fine hippie chick. By the time you’ve
> zipped through Inherent Vice’s 369 pages, you’ll probably want to start all
> over again. The author’s name on the cover changes nothing. This is still a
> beach read.
>
> Who'd 'a thunk it?
>
>