Inherent Vice review: Harvard Crimson

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 19, 2009, at 7:20 AM, János Székely wrote:

> "the normally lean detective genre"
>
> I never thought of Chandler as "lean" (and maybe not even as  
> "normal").
>
> János

Well, there's plenty of other gross errors of judgement in Ms. Jillian  
J. Goodman's review. In fact I'd say that the quirks of Chandler's  
descriptive prose left a heavy imprint on Pynchon:

	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.

I disagree. Plenty of folks found it engaging, Doc Sportello is  
Pynchon's most sympathetic protagonist so far. That Tommy's Burger  
thing was plenty precise, as are the quirky/weird songs he chooses for  
the soundtrack. I suspect that Inherent Vice is plenty intricate, but  
pulling out pattern in this case is just as much work as any other  
Pynchon novel—check citations, if some citation is obviously wrong,  
then ask why. This is a guy that knows that if you're going to use a  
handgun to produce a cool effect for your song arrangement, make sure  
that gun blast is in the same key as the song.

And we've only lived with this particular beast for seven weeks or so,  
give or take a few.

I'll give an example: the last page of Inherent Vice ends on Pynchon's  
thirty-third birthday. We know this because of the playoff game cited,  
where the Knicks beat the Lakers in the 1970 NBA playoffs. Earlier in  
the book, on page 113, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is mentioned, a basketball  
great who didn't didn't change his name from Lew Alcindor until 1971:

	 In 1971, several years after converting to Islam, he changed his 	 
name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Arabic: كريم عبد الجبار  
Karīm ‘Abd
	al-Jabbār).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kareem_Abdul-Jabbar

The dating of the book's last scene is too laden with significance to  
be accidental. So one might ask where we are being pointed when time  
gets out of joint. Of course, this is a fictional world, but it is  
still a fictional world full of details that co-respond to this so- 
called real world.  Is there something that happened in the spring of  
1971 we need to look at in the context of this novel? Is it just brain- 
fog and if it is brain-fog, is it Larry's or Tom's?

At the same time, the author drops all sorts of info concerning black  
ops in the U.S.A. during the Nixon Regime, quite specific times,  
places, names, going on about the subject of the CIA here more than in  
any other novel. I find it hard to believe the detail of Kareem Abdul- 
Jabbar's name being seemingly a year off  is mere sloppiness so I have  
to wonder what the author is aiming at. It looks to me that Inherent  
Vice depicts a growing police state, an Orwellian sense of dystopia  
that's growing under the glowing descriptive passages, funky  
restaurants and the wonderful/terrible jokes of Gordita Beach. At the  
same time it is also clear that Inherent Vice is designed to be as  
much of a Beach Read as the author can manage to come up with,  
considering his odd languages choices and all. Besides, let's face it,  
he ain't no Dan Brown. But Pynchon is still investigating the same  
territories he always did, asking a lot of the same questions, this  
time deliberately making a novel that would be accessible to folks  
outside the P-List. I have to wonder, at this late stage of the game,  
why Pynchon would want to do such a thing.