Inherent Vice (4 stars)

[Dave Monroe]

Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice (4 stars)

    * Source: The List (Issue 633)
    * Date: 9 July 2009
    * Written by: Miles Fielder

Less than half the length of his last 1000-page tome and riffing on
the relatively straightforward hardboiled crime genre as opposed to
the exhausting literary mash-up of Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon’s
seventh novel is the reclusive author’s most accessible to date.
Essentially a detective tale set in southern California at the butt
end of the 60s, it features a hippie PI named Doc Sportello who
emerges from a marijuana high to investigate the disappearance of a
millionaire property magnate.

The similarities to the Coen brothers’ stoner noir The Big Lebowski
are inescapable, but we’re nevertheless firmly in Pynchon territory. A
number of characters from the northern California-set Vineland pop up
here and there, but what makes this hilarious wise-ass yarn so
Pynchon-esque is the preoccupation with counter-pop-culture, corporate
imperialism and conspiracy theories. And it’s so effortlessly
evocative of its psychedelic milieu, it puts paid to the notion that
if one remembers the 60s one wasn’t there. Pynchon clearly was.

http://www.list.co.uk/article/18756-thomas-pynchon-inherent-vice/