IV review at The Millions

[Robert Mahnke]

http://www.themillions.com/2009/08/hard-boiled-or-half-baked-a-review-of-thomas-pynchons-inherent-vice.html

By GARTH RISK HALLBERG

When publishing industry stool-pigeons started whispering last fall
that Thomas Pynchon’s latest would be a detective novel, I couldn’t
see what the fuss was about. By my count, the man has already written
four. . . .

The novel’s ideas have a recycled quality, too. In this case, though,
a quality of obsession redeems them. Pynchon’s great subject has
turned out to be not paranoia but history: specifically, those moments
in it when the world might change, but doesn’t. If Against the Day
amounted to a sprawling catalogue of such moments, Inherent Vice
profitably limits itself to a specific instance – one Pynchon lived
through. As the novel shambles toward its conclusion, a pedal-note of
genuine loss builds:

"Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the
last fringes of occupancy, were . . . the Starship Enterprise,
Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with
invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball
highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and
midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle,
and Arnold the pig, and there was Doc, on the natch, caught in a
low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the
Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close
after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…"

The effect here is not nostalgia, which packages the past for
bite-sized consumption, and so palliates our hunger for utopia.
Rather, Pynchon seems to be trying to awaken us to the idea that
things might become other than they are, by reaching back for the last
time when Americans actually seemed to believe it – before, as Hunter
S. Thompson wrote, the “high and beautiful wave” of the middle Sixties
“finally broke and rolled back.” . . . .