IV review in The Quarterly Conversation

[Robert Mahnke]

http://quarterlyconversation.com/inherent-vice-by-thomas-pynchon-review

Review by Donald Brown

. . . . Ever since Lot 49 gave us that sense of being on “the leading
edge of revelation,” Pynchon has served readers what John Keats called
“negative capability . . . when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.” Inherent Vice once again delivers the trademark
rollicking with-it-ness of an author who doesn’t create fantasy worlds
so much as show us our own world at its most fantastic. This time,
however, it’s mostly for fun, a high-five for those who were there
then, a glimpse into the groove of it all for those who otherwise can
only daydream while sampling what Burbank hath bequeathed, whether
Adam-12 re-runs, or those Warners/Reprise samplers on used vinyl.

If the main strength of Inherent Vice is its particular sense of a
time and a place, this is helped by being the first Pynchon novel
since Lot 49 that is focused through one character. In fact, the
generally accepted idea that Lot 49 was a take-off on the basic
private eye plot, visited upon an unsuspecting but not wholly hapless
Republican Californian housewife, here finds its complement in an
actual private eye, one armed with the goofy stoner charm some readers
find in Oedipa’s estranged husband Mucho Maas (the first character in
Pynchon to opt for LSD-inspired savanthood) and in Vineland’s Zoyd
Wheeler.

But Doc is a tougher customer than those worthies, since, after all,
he does make some kind of living as a gumshoe, or as Bigfoot would
have it, “gumsandal.” Whatever else he may be, Doc seems to be an
homage to the late Hunter S. Thompson, whose persona as a journalist
more inclined to tackle a job when he could be blitzed while doing it
produced a druggy but sharp prose derived from the same
California-based fount that fed Raymond Chandler. In Doc, Pynchon has
created a character with the ethos of Thompson and the moxie of
Phillip Marlowe, and that, as readability goes, is cause for praise.

And the novel’s weakness? It’s that very same fondness for the perhaps
regrettable over-indulgence of the period it depicts. Keats
notwithstanding, if you’re of the mind that there are many good
reasons to reach for fact and logic, you might become irritable indeed
with the “to be young then was very bliss” tone that Pynchon never
ironizes or critiques. He’s playing stoned straight, in other words,
not bending the realities of the times to suit some 21st-century
ideological purpose but just reliving the high times. As with
Vineland—where the politics seemed as canned as sitcom
laughter—Inherent Vice makes all the predictable moves about who the
bad guys are without really giving us much hope for the good guys. But
if you were there then—or anywhere in the vicinity of the era—you’ll
swear he must’ve been in the same room with you, soaking up stoned
commentaries on commercials and TV shows.

. . . . Pynchon, finally, isn’t a Gatsby, trying to repeat the past,
or an aging rocker repeating the same riffs. The pasts he evokes are
fueled by a sense of the present. Gravity’s Rainbow closed its
evocation of the end of WWII by suddenly inhabiting California, c.
1972, making explicit the sense that the world the novel evoked was
part of the present. Inherent Vice, light-hearted, funny, a quick
end-of-summer read, aches at times with that peculiar double-vision
found in all Pynchon’s work, in which the past and the present bear
witness to one another, holding each to a condition of truth neither
would admit to on its own.