INHERENT VICE - Thomas Pynchon - Fiction

[alice wellintown]

On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2010, at 5:05 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> I'd suggest any other P novel but IV. At least VL has Prairie and she
>> is the "teen protagonist" sort of coming of age. Seems more
>> appropriate. Can 13-year-old kids dig all that "strange sex" and
>> parody in IV?
>
> Pish & Tosh! Of course they can!—What is more ridiculous then Grampa Doper
> van Winkle's stoned adventures among the Acedia Squad?

A bunch of stuff. Like lots of kids have their own rediculous stuff
and like,. it's not all just bad youtube and twit my twat.


Strange sex is all
> over teen comedies, what is "American Pie", what is this whole "Vampire"
> teen meme anyway if not a parable about teen sex? And parody is all over
> teen comedy, it's one of the lower forms of humor after all.

Yeah, but like  IV isn't exactly scarey movie III ya know there's like
a lot more to it.

>
>> Doubt it. I'm still wondering if, since I read IV as
>> having an unreliable narrator, is a work that, while ostensibly sold
>> to the beach reader. . .
>
> naaah, it was sold to nerdy lit-crit types who look down at beach readers,
> all part of an elaborate plan.

That's how Lot49 is sold on the college campus, but that's not how
Pynchon & Co. marketed IV. They went to relative extremes to sell the
book to the beach reader and to the usual suspects. It didn't work.
Was it some kind of deal? Do wife and publishing company push Tommy
out into the Simpsons and the slick package not so low profile
inherent vive and did he only agree to do it with a wink and a fart?
Seems to me that's what we have here. A joke.

>
>> , isn't an elaborate hoax in the tradition of Poe
>> and Melville. Maybe it's both a poor parody of a potboiling beach read
>> and a hoax.
>
> Not at all. Like some reviewer said of CoL49, the real mystery is the
> writer. The real P.I. question inside of Inherent Vice is "How did a nice
> Cornell grad get caught up in a mess like this?" It's not like the author is
> being all that "Coy" about where he's been and what he's been doing down
> there.

Seems like coy mistress has run out of world enough and time. Nothing
much to say and not much sand left before the wicket bitch gets her
little pretty.


>
>> Maybe it's just what Melville called "cash" or a book that
>> the author would rather not admit he pushed out on the world. Yeah,
>> that's it.
>
> "I like to call this case 'number Sick, Sick, Sick'." [sic.] And have no
> doubt that this sit-com noir was burbling in TRP's brain for the longest
> time of all of 'em. Nope, reads as fully developed, complete onto itself and
> clearly semi-autobiographical. Lot a kid could learn from that.

A kid can learn a lot just keepin her eyes peeled.


>> So pushing it on a kid reader seems wrong. There are a
>> million books that kid might better spend the time with. M&D is a fine
>> read for a bright teen.
>
> But too dense for adults. And it's not really for a "bright teen", T 'n A,
> more like a prodigy simply based on language and vocabulary issues. Unless
> Cervantes is your idea of a beach read.

You're the expert, I just work here.

>
>> At least she would learn something about
>> America. IV has little of the depth and historical perspective that VL
>> provides.
>
> Are you kidding? Perhaps out of your friggin' mind? Oodles of lessons in
> American history. Maybe not the lessons you want to teach America's youth,
> but certainly lessons I want to teach America's youth. Of course it's easy
> enough to shake the history out from TRP's usual "literary"—as in "make it
> literary"—concerns. But the lessons in American history are all on the
> surface, like oil on velvet, like the arrows that point to 7000 Romaine, Los
> Angeles 38, like the joint in the Tommy's Burger, like the black-light
> refulgence of "South Bay" in Gordita Beach.

Like, like, like, yeah, like.

>
>> Even Lot49, P's second orphan anmd weakest work would be a
>> better recommendation.
>
> Well, it's clear that CoL49/VL & IV will be taught together as a trilogy in
> the very near future, seeing as they are all set in California and concerned
> with the C.I.A. to a greater degree than the other books.
> Sleuthing/Spying/"Intelligence" are central concerns of all of TRP's tales,
> but the CIA applies in a specific way to the California Trilogy, none moreso
> than Inherent Vice. I've no doubt there's plenty of veiled autobiography in
> all three and in part that's the reason the CIA has that big of a part to
> play in these three books,

The CIA plays the tuba and can't even get a blow in most of the songs
in these works. But keep banging that old tin drum.


>
>> On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 1:48 AM, Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> "For any thirteen-year-olds out there who may be about to give Pynchon
>>> a try, I'd recommend it."
>>>
>>>
>>> 2010/1/2 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://bibliotomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/inherent-vice-thomas-pynchon-fiction.html
>