Inherent Vice Review, Otago Daily Times

[Robin Landseadel]

	Victor Billot reviews Inherent Vice.
	INHERENT VICE
	Thomas Pynchon
	Random,$38.99, pbk

	The humble detective novel is exhumed, deconstructed, and
	reconstructed by Thomas Pynchon - not recommended for
	those who like detective novels, in the generally accepted
	sense, but a strangely appropriate form for the Pynchonmodus
	operandi.

	An obsessive and labyrinthine style, conspiracies and
	esoterica, an intimation of great and subterranean powers at
	work, with so many multiple levels of frantic activity the text
	resembles an archaeological dig more than a book.

	A clue perhaps is contained in the title of the novel.

	"Inherent vice" is a maritime term for goods rendered 	
	uninsurable from unacceptable risk, because of factors in the
	nature or quality of the goods themselves.

	"Doc" Sportello is the hazed-out flatfoot, equal parts Jeffrey
	Lebowski and Philip Marlowe, stranded in time on Gordita
	Beach on the wrong side of the '60s.

	On the trail of a missing magnate, Sportello travels deep into
	the fading afterglow of the flatlined Love Revolution.

	From the surfside stoner cafes to the wrong end of Vegas,
	Pynchon's luminously fantastic characters - Trillium Fortnight,
	Dr Buddy Tubeside and "El Drano" among them - are denizens
	populating a mythical California of the mind where conversation
	hinges on the lost continent of Lemuria, surf rock crackles from
	the car radio and rumours circulate of a sinister force known as
	the "Golden Fang".

	Sportello's quest is soon subsumed into rapidly breeding
	subplots of fiendish intricacy that derail any sense of forward
	momentum.

	Rather than advancing in linear time, the narrative seems to
	implode under its own weight.

	As "Doc" Sportello drives off into the sea mist, many readers will
	still be left, lost and wandering in the fog.

	Yet among the compulsive wisecracking and convolutions,
	Pynchon conjures vibrant and haunting music that remains
	etched in the memory: "The leaves of the palm trees outside
	rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the
	darkened rooms, in louvred light, it sounded like a rainstorm,
	the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating
	together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you
	to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be
	the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight."

http://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/92082/book-review-inherent-vice