Inherent Vice: Entertainment Weekly Review

[Robin Landseadel]

Later, Gilles Deleuse in an exclusive interview on "E Entertainment."


Plenty Spolier-ish, see below


















































	BOOK REVIEW
	Inherent Vice (2009)
	Thomas Pynchon

	By Sean Howe
	The name ''Thomas Pynchon'' usually evokes thoughts of a
	reclusive genius who every few years blesses M.F.A. hipsters
	and Mensa applicants with intricately layered postmodern
	behemoths. So it might be a shock to learn that his latest book,
	Inherent Vice, is, at a mere 369 pages, a relatively breezy work
	of genre fiction. Upon further consideration, though, it's a
	wonder this didn't happen sooner: What better vehicle for
	Pynchon's favorite subjects (conspiracy, radical politics, trash
	culture) than a detective novel set in post-Manson Los
	Angeles? In the dependable tradition of Raymond Chandler,
	things get under way when a missing-persons case turns into a
	web of intrigue. Our burnout hero, private dick Doc Sportello,
	agrees to find the new lover of his ex-girlfriend Shasta and soon
	gets mixed up with Thai hookers, a motorcycle gang, a surf-rock
	saxophonist, and a narcotics dealer named El Drano. (For
	Pynchon trainspotters, there's also an appearance by one of the
	Corvairs, the rock band from 1990'sVineland.) Thwarted at
	every turn and garnering respect from no one, Sportello
	somewhat resembles Elliott Gould's wiseacre Philip Marlowe
	from the 1973 Robert Altman film The Long Goodbye, which
	also populated its L.A. with hash-brownie casualties and New
	Age quacks. But he's even closer to The Big Lebowski's Dude,
	 a charmingly drippy screwup fighting through a stoned haze to
	fathom the labyrinths of criminal machinations. ''Gahhh!'' cries a
	joint-smoking Sportello while trying to connect the dots between
	 a heroin-smuggling ring, the CIA, and a schooner called the
	Golden Fang. ''I am, like, overthinking myself into brainfreeze,
	here.'' Readers are advised to avoid such mind-fryings — as
	with Chandler's infamously impossible-to-follow plots, sleuthing
	the case is hardly the point of Inherent Vice. Savor it instead for
	Pynchonian linguistic flights and slapstick set pieces. But the
	nicest surprise of all is the heart-on-sleeve wistfulness that
	finally peeks through the comic riffing, in the descriptions of
	Sportello's undying love for Shasta and an elegiac appreciation
	of the era. Coming from the man who once railed ''there is
	nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist,'' this qualifies
	as a revolutionary shift. The new Pynchon: a beach read and a
	 heartstring puller. It's almost surreal. A

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