Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon (384 pages).

[Dave Monroe]

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon (384 pages)

Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical
surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry Doc
Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous
femme fatales. We're in early-'70s Southern California, so Gordita
Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the
plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon's
recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away. It
all starts with Pynchon's least conspicuous intro ever: She came along
the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to-she being
Doc's old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted
tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and
counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another,
even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big's strings is always a villain
even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon's unmatched gift for
finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing
excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music
and Locard's exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a
side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there's a blissful,
sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets,
cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt.
Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly
suggestive setting, the novel's bones need only a touch of the
screenwriter's dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American
literature's most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable. Inherent
Vice deepens Pynchon's developing California cycle, following The
Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden
mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition-yet never quite beyond
hope. Across five decades now, he's more or less alternated these West
Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity's
Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may
find this one a tad slight.

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