The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles

[Robin Landseadel]

WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 17.08
Mark Horowitz	

Interactive map of Pynchonia:

	Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the
	information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles
	—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has
	always been central to the elusive writer's weird
	weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War
	hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture
	references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s
	and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick
	of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an
	homage to those bygone days, plus something no one
	expected from the notoriously private author: a
	semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the
	psychedelic '60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder
	mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon
	himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen
	conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. (The Big Lebowski meets
	The Big Sleep.) And if you map the novel against Pynchon's life
	in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.

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