Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Robin Landseadel]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 5:27 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> I also *really* do not like it, though I'm willing to pick through  
> the carcass, looking for shreds of

Smegmo?

> ... ick, I'll drop that metaphor -- not enough caffeine in the  
> system to think it through.

Is there ever enough caffeine to think through Pynchon's mazes?

> Anyway, I'd place IV solidly at the bottom of any ranking or rating  
> of Pynchon's works [haven't read his Minstrel Island script,  
> admittedly]. I certainly hope nothing else dislodges it from that  
> position.  Is there anyone here who'd disagree?  Speak up!
>
> Laura

[raises hand with trepidation]

I don't know where—or why—I'd place Inherent Vice. Probably next to  
"Vineland', another "failure" of Pynchon's that I enjoyed from the  
date of issue to the present. Seems like the book is a bit of a  
rorschach test. From my angle, having witnessed a lot of L.A. from the  
perspective of living there, often viewing the lay of the land from a  
moving car with the radio on, Inherent Vice strikes me as the most  
successful of all of Pynchon's books in catching the flavor of "The  
City of The Angels." Having been a fan of Raymond Chandler long before  
I "got into" Pynchon, I can see how his "strategy of transference"  
works particularly well with an author he clearly venerates—or at  
least has been consciously stealing routines from the get-go.

The bits of Pynchon I like the least are in his earliest stories. I  
find cringe-worthy passages a-plenty in the stories collected in "Slow  
Learner," & moments in "V." where I'd rather be reading the phone  
book. There's a few passages in CoL49 where I have to ask—"Why did he  
do that?"

But I'm pretty sure the "WTF" moments in IV are there to piss off the  
lit-crit crowd. Those "high culture/low culture" themes found in  
Raymond Chandler's mysteries—"The Long Goodbye" in particular—are  
alive and well in Inherent Vice. Much as the New England  
Transcendentalist/"Great American Novel" themes found in Gravity's  
Rainbow are deliberately forced to bump up against the commercial, the  
ephemeral, the quotidian, the tawdry in Gravity's Rainbow so here we  
have a Mise-en-scène that corresponds to where the author was during  
the writing of GR. Gordita/Manhattan Beach in the spring of 1970 looks/ 
sounds/feels like a spectacularly paranoid place. For me, it makes it  
all the clearer where GR came from. So, knowing where the author is  
pointing, I find Inherent Vice  particularly fascinating.