Inherent Vice review: Harvard Crimson

[Robin Landseadel]

We are ready to announce this novel's winner of the coveted "Critical  
Bashing" award, Ms. Jillian J. Goodman. The title of her winning essay  
is : "Pynchon's Noir "Inherently" Minor":

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“At least there is at hand a testament—this first novel ‘V’—which  
suggests that no matter what his circumstances, or where he’s doing  
it, there is at work a young writer of staggering promise.”

So began the literary career of Thomas Pynchon, whose latest novel,  
“Inherent Vice,” we gather here today to celebrate. Since George A.  
Plimpton ’50 wrote the above praise some 46 years ago, Pynchon has  
indeed succeeded in turning staggering promise into staggering  
achievement. His third novel, 1973’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is one of  
those works—like Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”—that  
literary junkies force themselves to read and pray that they’ll one  
day understand. He has received a National Book Award (for that  
novel), a MacArthur “genius grant,” and is consistently on the rumored  
short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

All of this perhaps explains why the critical response to “Inherent  
Vice,” released earlier this summer, has been long on career  
retrospection and short on evaluation. So let me say it now: “Inherent  
Vice” is not a very good novel. It’s not engaging. It’s not inventive.  
It’s not intricate, and it’s not precise. What it is, though, is an  
opportunity to examine the stately decline of one of literature’s most  
enigmatic and gigantic figures.

“Inherent Vice” is a typically Pynchonian take on the detective genre,  
starring Larry “Doc” Sportello as a sandal-wearing, beach-dwelling,  
pot-smoking Private Eye. The paranoiac narrative—situated historically  
around the 1970 Manson Family murder trial and geographically around  
the fictional Gordita Beach on the California coast—begins when an old  
flame named Shasta Fay approaches Doc with a vaguely defined mission:  
to protect her current boyfriend, real-estate heavyweight Mickey  
Wolfmann, from the shadowy forces trying to put him on ice.

And then she disappears. In the process of trying to find Shasta—and  
Mickey, who disappears simultaneously, but separately—Doc winds up  
entangled with an undead saxophonist, a contract killer, several drug  
dealers, and a dentist, all somehow connected to a sinister outfit  
called the “Golden Fang.”

For a primer to help you decode what seems convoluted in “Inherent  
Vice,” look to Pynchon’s second novel, “The Crying of Lot 49,” an  
altogether more effective version of the same basic literary ideas.  
That novel is also a paranoia-infused narrative set in California, in  
which an (amateur) private investigator (“Oedipa Maas”) is on the  
trail of another sinister outfit (“W.A.S.T.E”), a trail that leads her  
to just as many interesting characters and down trippy narrative side  
streets, with names even fruitier than the characters in “Inherent  
Vice” (“Pierce Inverarity,” “Randy Driblette,” “Genghis Cohen”). It’s  
also half the number of pages.

In ways both formal and thematic, “Inherent Vice” is a Pynchon  
nostalgia trip, one more journey to the author’s literary roots. It’s  
interesting to watch a man of such genius walk back over familiar  
ground, this time with the beneficial wisdom but the consequential  
loss of stamina that come when a great writer ages. In his review for  
the “New York Review of Books,” Michael Wood classed the book as “a  
shaggy detective story parodied by Thomas Pynchon, or perhaps like a  
moderately baggy Thomas Pynchon novel parodied by a devotee of the  
detective story.”

“Inherent Vice” lacks the energy and inspiration that propelled “The  
Crying of Lot 49” to become a twentieth century classic. It might have  
turned a cheap noir pastiche in lesser hands, the work of a writer  
resting on his laurels or trying to pick up a check. But given the  
extent to which the detective genre informs novels like “V.,” “The  
Crying of Lot 49,” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the somehow hypnotic  
quality of even the book’s mangiest sections, it’s clear that Pynchon  
retains a deep affection for the genre even now. Similarly, his novels  
have always dabbled heavily in references to the pulp novel’s cultural  
siblings—rock music and monster movies—so, despite the seeming retreat  
into genre fiction, he maintains a continuity of style, if his  
substantive fingerprints are still conspicuously absent.

Unfortunately, the rigid pacing and logical arc of the conventional  
detective story don’t quite jive with Pynchon’s classic (one might  
say, inherent) psychedelia. The novel really does feel shaggy and  
baggy, because the normally lean detective genre has had to loosen up  
to accommodate Pynchon’s wild narrative loops and quixotic scenic  
fancies. When the dentist’s secretary pauses a plot-advancing  
conversation to ask Doc’s friend—“Excuse me, . . . is that a slice of  
pizza on your hat?” —the irksomeness of the interruption overshadows  
the humor of his response (“Oh wow, thanks man, I’ve been lookin [sic]  
all over for that…”)

Some of the author’s old tricks still dazzle though, as when Doc buys  
“Wyatt Earp’s personal mustache cup” from a man in Las Vegas whose  
name turns out to be a “byword of fraudulent Earpiana.” But it turns  
out to be authentic against all the odds—excessive faith is, after  
all, the flipside of paranoia.

Perhaps with all his Nazis, conspiracies, and marijuana, Pynchon is  
actually a creature of excessive faith. Following the clues in a 40- 
plus-year literary career leads one to the idea that Pynchon will keep  
on producing, slowly and steadily, until he just keels over. Although  
he fulfilled the promise Plimpton saw many years and more pages ago,  
“Inherent Vice” demonstrates that Pynchon is always willing to go back  
to the well, with the faith that there will still be something there.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529017