IV panned by Kirkus

[Henry Winkler]

"Groovier than much of this erratic author's fiction, but a bummer compared
with his best."

Reviews by Booklist and Kirkus are posted at the BN website:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Inherent-Vice/Thomas-Pynchon/e/9781594202247/?itm=1

I cut and pasted them below but there are spoilers so caveat emptor...









 Donna Seaman - Booklist

"Did I say that out loud?" Doc Sportello asks. It's hard to keep things
straight when you're high. Unlike his hard-core L.A. noir compatriots, this
private eye's primary vice is pot, not booze. It's the roach-end of the
1960s, and the sole proprietor and employee of LSD Investigations (Location,
Surveillance, Detection) uses the flair of his bellbottoms to conceal his
gun and muses, "A private eye didn't drop acid for years in this town
without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops." And doesn't he milk his
spaced-out pothead persona for everything it's worth as he searches for
missing construction mogul Mickey Wolfmann. Doc's haphazard (or is it?)
investigation is complicated by his nemesis, a cop called Bigfoot Bjornsen;
Doc's persistent feelings for his ex and affair with a district attorney;
memory lapses; and hallucinations. Pynchon is frolicking in this psychedelic
mystery, featuring dopers, surfers, bikers, predators, and parasites, drugs
and counterfeit money, setups and switchbacks, and the Golden Fang, a
stealth ship. As Doc wiggles and smokes his way out of gnarly predicaments,
Pynchon skewers urban renewal, television, government surveillance, and the
looming computer age. A bit of a mystery himself, master writer Pynchon has
created a bawdy, hilarious, and compassionate electric-acid-noir satire
spiked with passages of startling beauty. Starred Review.
Kirkus Reviews

For better and worse, this is the closest Pynchon is likely to come to a
beach book. A psychedelic beach book, of course: It's hippie-era Los
Angeles, and our hero smokes marijuana the way others smoke cigarettes,
which is something of an occupational hazard in a profession that requires
deductive abilities. About a third the length of its predecessor (Against
the Day, 2006, etc.) and as breezy as a detective novel by Tom Robbins, the
book begins with a beautiful woman walking into the office of private
investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello to ask for help. Formerly Doc's
girlfriend, Shasta has been associating more recently with Mickey Wolfmann,
a very rich and married developer whom Doc knows from the newspapers as "the
real estate big shot." Mickey's wife and her lover apparently want him
institutionalized, but as usual in a Pynchon novel, there are conspiracies
atop conspiracies as Doc tries to get to the people who are running the
people who seem to be running things. With Charlie Manson poisoning the
free-love ethos and land-grab developers putting the soul of Southern
California up for grabs, Doc finds himself enmeshed deeper in a plot that
defies resolution. The mystery focuses on the Golden Fang, which may be a
schooner, a heroin cartel, an enterprise of "vertical integration" or a vast
international conspiracy. Maybe all of the above. The story will make the
most sense to those as stoned as Doc, though it's hard to resist questions
like, "Anybody understand why they call it ‘real' estate?" or a simile such
as "the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time"-highly
appropriate for a protagonist who tends to divide the totality of experience
into "groovy" and "bummer."Or, once, for emphasis, "Bumm. Er."Groovier than
much of this erratic author's fiction, but a bummer compared with his best.
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