Inherent Vice review: Harvard Crimson

[Mark Kohut]

yes, the young lady overgeneralizes about the standard size of most generic mysteries you wouldn't want to read.

And, as we all know, the riviews were very evaluative....

--- On Sat, 9/19/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Inherent Vice review: Harvard Crimson
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, September 19, 2009, 3:12 PM
> 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.
>