IVIV: chapter seven—.45 Caliber Kissoff

[Robin Landseadel]

Somehow it all fits. Ran into this September 2 review of Inherent  
Vice. I think this guy is onto something:

	In and Out of the Fog:
	Inhaling Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice”
	Stuart Mitchner

	In a book where some radio station’s constantly playing period
	music (amazon.com offers a downloadable playlist apparently
	provided by the author), the reference to a record fits right in.
	You could also put together a DVD anthology of the quotes from
	Hollywood, but don’t go looking for Burke Stodger in .45-
	Caliber-Kissoff.

It's possible I read this review and then ignored it before, but this  
seems like a good time and place to repost it:

		Really to read Pynchon properly you would have to be
		astonishingly learned not only about literature but about a
		vast number of other subjects belonging to the disciplines
		and to popular culture, learned to the point where learning
		is almost a sensuous pleasure, something to play around
		with, to feel totally relaxed about, so that you can take in
		stride every dizzying transition from one allusive mode to
		another.
		Richard Poirier

	I’d just started Thomas Pynchon’s latest creation, Inherent Vice
	(Penguin $27.95) when a copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with
	the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage $14.95) came my way. Though I
	rarely read thrillers, I put Pynchon aside for this one because of
	the title character. As soon as that anorexic hacker Lisbeth
	Salander entered the story, I couldn’t stop reading. Two days
	after she held out her skinny hand and pulled me in, I was
	done, and I’d have gone right on to The Girl Who Played with
	Fire except for the Pynchon, which has taken me three weeks to
	get through.

	I have to scratch my head when I read reviews describing
	Inherent Vice as “a beach read,” a “page-turner,” a “breezy work
	of genre fiction,” an “amusing snapshot.” This convoluted jeu de
	cannibas is less a page-turner than a mind-twister, and just as
	marijuana can make a minute feel like an hour, Pynchon can
	make his novel’s 369 pages feel like 800. The California setting
	and counterculture ambience recall his most accessible novel,
	Vineland (1990), but that one’s a lark by comparison. To
	properly apprehend Inherent Vice you have to access, inhabit,
	and more or less disappear into the pot-befogged brain of its
	private eye protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello. As you trace your
	way through the holes and fissures, nooks and crannies of
	narrative, it’s like trying to make sense of fragments laid out on
	a sheet of paper resembling the one Doc inserts in his Olivetti
	that “appeared to have been used repeatedly for some strange
	compulsive origami.” Things begin to make sense only when
	you realize that Pynchon is creating his own stoned aesthetic;
	he wants to disorient you.

	Over and over again Pynchon replicates in the mad matrix of
	his plot the memory lapses Doc is constantly subject to, as
	when after doing an impersonation of Edward G. Robinson, he
	asks, “Oh. Was … I doing that out loud?” Or when after eating a
	meal, he asks, “What happened to our food man, it’s taking
	them an awful long time to bring it.” Or: “Being the continuation
	of a long story Doc had forgotten, or maybe missed, the
	beginning of.” All through the book it’s what and how and who.
	What story? Beginning where? Told by whom? The question
	mark rules, punctuating even seemingly simple declarative
	lines of dialogue.
		Missing Something

	After suggesting that Inherent Vice “does not appear to be a
	Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions,” Louis
	Menand is closer to the truth when he admits in his New Yorker
	review, “I could be missing something, of course. (I could be
	missing everything.)” In case you think that you’re not dealing
	with a “Pynchonian palimpsest,” just visit Inherent Vice’s
	wikipedia-gone-wild website’s page-by-page variorum.

	Menand’s admission could have come from the lips of Doc
	Sportello himself, a man who can’t get through a minute of the
	day without thinking he’s “missing something” or forgetting
	having done something he just did. Imagine a caper involving
	all the usual LA-noirish elements (real estate swindles,
	kidnapping, murder) being investigated by a detective whose
	thought process is described in terms of things “deliberately lost
	and found again … and there was something now scratching
	like a rogue chicken at the fringes of the unkempt barnyard that
	was Doc’s brain, but he couldn’t quite locate it, let alone
	account for the critter when evening rolled around.” Exactly the
	paradigm of Inherent Vice: you read a reference to a place,
	person, incident, you lose it (but not deliberately), then you find
	it (if you look hard enough).

	It isn’t just that Pynchon’s doing a number on Raymond
	Chandler’s Philip Marlowe here. Doc can also be read as a
	travesty of Sherlock Holmes (if not on the same low-comedy
	level as the Mad Comics version); instead of the cocaine-
	energized mastermind you have a pot head who hallucinates
	clues (“It helps to smoke a lot of weed and do acid on and off”)
	and is a good shot when it counts: “He waited till he saw a
	dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling
	away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into
	the mouth of Time.” Perfect. You begin in Chandler country and
	end up on Gummo Marx Way in the Pynchon District, where
	things go round and round “but never end up in exactly the
	same place,” to quote Bigfoot Bjornsen, Doc’s LAPD
	nemesis/sidekick (the Lestrade to his Holmes, the Claude
	Rains to his Bogart, the Abbott to his Costello). “Like a record
	on a turntable,” according to Bigfoot, “all it takes is one groove’s
	difference and the universe can be on into a whole ’nother
	song.”

	In a book where some radio station’s constantly playing period
	music (amazon.com offers a downloadable playlist apparently
	provided by the author), the reference to a record fits right in.
	You could also put together a DVD anthology of the quotes from
	Hollywood, but don’t go looking for Burke Stodger in .45-
	Caliber-Kissoff.

	When you come right down to it, Doc is less a character than a
	whole twilight-of-the-sixties state of mind disguised as a private
	eye. With Lisbeth Salander, you know how she talks, thinks,
	looks, sounds, and smells. With Doc, it’s more subtle, like the
	“glittering mosaic of doubt” the first paragraph of Chapter 20
	compares to the marine insurance term that gives the book its
	title. “Inherent vice” is “stuff marine policies don’t like to cover.”
	Like a cargo of eggs that might break. Or, as Doc suggests, “like
	original sin.” Or, from the same paragraph, like a private eye
	“who got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one
	they began to float apart into little blobs of color.” It’s no surprise
	that a book as compellingly cryptic as Inherent Vice pictures this
	derangement as both “a kind of limit” and “a gateway to the
	past.” One thing for sure, if you want to smell Doc, all you have
	to do is light a joint and remember how it was way back in those
	innocent days of yore when the odor all by itself was enough to
	get you high.

	From the concept called Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 to
	the essence of delight in Vice called Trillium Fortnight,
	Pynchon’s characters may not exert the same human
	fascination as Lisbeth Salander, but one of this novelist’s
	favorite fixations involves exploring the no-man’s land between
	character and concept, which is why he writes literature and
	Stieg Larsson writes page-turners. Fog in Larsson is just fog, a
	piece of functional atmosphere. In Pynchon it’s the holy grail of
	metaphor. You have fog as fog, fog as atmosphere, fog as the
	element of the mystery and all its oddities and obfuscations, or
	as the smoke of a drugged-out narrative the reader is moving
	carefully through, or, most powerfully, at the end, fog as “a patch
	of blindness” being traversed by a convoy of cars “like a
	caravan in a desert of perception.” The fog-eloquent concluding
	paragraphs of Inherent Vice are worth more than a thousand
	page-turners, even ones as accomplished as The Girl with the
	Dragon Tattoo.

	Also worth a mention according to what separates the inhaling
	of a Pynchon joint-in-prose from a page turner is that it’s often
	laugh-out-loud funny. At its weakest, Vice’s humor makes you
	grimace and roll your eyes; at its best the humor pulls you in —
	as happens early on with the description of Doc’s place of
	employment where the sign reads LSD INVESTIGATIONS (the
	LSD standing for Location. Surveillance. Detection), beneath
	which is “a rendering of a giant bloodshot eyeball in the
	psychedelic favorites green and magenta, the detailing of
	whose literally thousands of frenzied capillaries had been
	subcontracted out to a commune of speed freaks who had long
	since migrated up to Sonoma.”

	As for Doc’s office, it consists of “a pair of high-backed
	banquettes covered in padded fuchsia plastic, facing each
	other across a Formica table in a pleasant tropical green. This
	was in fact a modular coffee-shop booth, which Doc had
	scavenged from a renovation in Hawthorne.”

	And put in place by Thomas Pynchon, who has been
	scavenging literature out of the waste of culture and history for
	almost 50 years now.
		Poirier’s Rainbow

	Just as it was impossible to write about the Beatles and Lester
	Young in the shadow of Richard Poirier’s August 15 death
	without mentioning the impact of his work, the same is even
	truer in reference to Pynchon. Poirier was arguably the first
	literary authority to write about and teach Thomas Pynchon. It
	was Poirier who greeted Pynchon’s debut V (1963) in the New
	York Review of Books, declaring that it earned the author “the
	right to be called one of the best [novelists] we have now.”
	Three years later his New York Times review of The Crying of
	Lot 49 helped put Pynchon on the literary map, much as his
	eloquent, in-depth reading of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in the
	Saturday Review created the excitement that helped make
	Pynchon’s masterpiece a best-seller and eventual National
	Book Award winner.

	It would be hard to imagine a more inspiring teacher-author
	pairing than Poirier and Pynchon, a combination I was fortunate
	enough to see in action at Rutgers in Poirier’s course on
	Recent American Literature. Any student who also happened to
	be exploring Joyce or Spenser in Introduction to Graduate
	Study in the late sixties knows that Poirier’s classes were
	usually no less brilliantly and deviously plotted than The Crying
	of Lot 49. Each session was a communal quest for the luminous
	resolution that never quite completely emerged from a
	classroom work-in-progress that could be both fascinating and
	exhausting. Pynchon provides a fitting analogy to that
	experience at the end of Inherent Vice, if you can imagine
	Poirier as the larger guiding light in that fogbound convoy “of
	unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight
	range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile
	for safety in getting across a patch of blindness.”

	The passage quoted in the epigraph is from Richard Poirier’s
	essay “The Importance of Thomas Pynchon,” which can be
	found in the groundbreaking anthology edited by his
	colleagues George Levine and David Leverenz, Mindful
	Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown 1976),
	available at the Princeton Public Library

http://www.towntopics.com/sep0209/book.php