Inherent Vice: Review from nchon’s stoned detective. by Louis Menand

[Robin Landseadel]

Louis Menand weighs in from the New Yorker:

	SOFT-BOILED
	Pynchon’s stoned detective.
	by Louis Menand
	AUGUST 3, 2009

	
	"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
	mean,” Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum states. It appeared
	in an essay called “The Simple Art of Murder,” published in
	1944—Chandler’s attempt to define what might give a little
	literary dignity to the murder mystery. Chandler had aspirations
	for the genre, and it annoyed him that most mystery writers
	seemed not to, that they turned out unrealistic plot contraptions
	for an undemanding readership—“Murder on the Orient
	Express”-type theatricals, in which the solution to the mystery is
	usually whatever is least probable. Chandler believed that what
	redeemed the form, what made it art, or potentially art, was the
	character of the detective, and that the detective should be
	(unlike Hercule Poirot or, from another mystery writer Chandler
	held in contempt, Lord Peter Wimsey) a man who goes down
	mean streets. “He is the hero,” Chandler wrote. “He is
	everything. He must be a complete man and a common man
	and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered
	phrase, a man of honor. . .

	. . . “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian
	palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing
	something, of course. I could be missing everything.) . . .

As Bugs Bunny sez:

		"Hmmmmmm . . .      . . . Could be ! ! !"

[for the sake of those who don't care about spoilers, here goes]:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/08/03/090803crbo_books_menand