Inherent Vice: Review in Metro UK

[Robin Landseadel]

Short, sweet and to the point:

	Crime tale’s a rich diversion
	Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)
	By ALAN CHADWICK - Wednesday, July 29, 2009

	The buzz surrounding Thomas Pynchon's new novel has
	centred on the fact the literary recluse has chosen (at least on
	the surface) to venture into crime fiction.
	Even more surprising is what a bright, breezy, funny page-
	turner the book turns out to be.

	It's smart, too, of course, but in an incredibly accessible way for
	a change. Hell, the Coen Brothers could make a movie of it.
	And when was the last time anyone outside film school thought
	that was possible with a Pynchon novel?

	An end-of-an-era, late-1960s-psychedelia LA noir, it recalls
	Elmore Leonard with its snappy dialogue and cast of eccentric
	characters – a supposedly dead sax player; Nazi bikers;
	surfers; hardbitten cops; and trippy-hippy potheads.
	Only with postmodern tics thrown in for good measure (at one
	point Pynchon's stoner gumshoe Doc Sportello, more
	accurately described by one character as a 'gumsandal', allows
	himself a riff on the decline of the private investigator in pop
	culture).

	Sportello's investigation into the disappearance of billionaire
	land developer Mickey Wolfmann gets the ball rolling in an
	entertaining yarn rich on period detail in which all roads appear
	to lead back to the mysterious Golden Fang cartel.

	Best of all, however, is the way Pynchon maps the psycho-
	geography and shifting sociopolitical sands of America at the
	time (drugs; the widening gulf between 'straight life' and
	counterculture; paranoia; and secret information).
	In so doing, he shows how the cracks in social cohesion then
	inevitably paved the way for the bleak fault lines dividing the US
	 now.

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/books/article.html?Crime_tale%92s_a_rich_diversion&in_article_id=710577&in_page_id=28