Book Bag: Some Suggestions on How to Use Those Gift Cards

[Dave Monroe]

Book Bag: Some Suggestions on How to Use Those Gift CardsBy Tim Neagle


So you’ve got that gift certificate from Santa to some bookstore
chain, and you’re trying to decide how to spend it. Here are some
brief reviews of worthy candidates:

[...]

Inherent Vice
By Thomas Pynchon


Pynchon’s latest is both a send-up and a tribute to the great American
tradition of detective novels. Set in Southern California in 1970,
Inherent Vice is a book with many plot twists, an engaging hero and
lots of sex and drugs.

Our detective is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a height-challenged pothead
who tries to sort out a baffling mystery through a haze of marijuana
smoke. (If you have a deep-seated philosophical objection to people
smoking weed, this is not the book for you.)

Doc is asked by an old girlfriend , Shasta Fay Hepworth, to protect
her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfman. According to
Shasta, Mickey’s ex-wife is plotting to put him in an insane asylum.
Doc goes to investigate, ends up getting cold-cocked and wakes up to
find Mickey missing and one of his bodyguards dead. The LAPD thinks
Doc had something to do with these criminal developments, and the rest
of the book is a wild ride as Doc tries to find Mickey and unravel the
murder mystery.

Along the way, we encounter lost (and found) musicians, a sexy
District Attorney and a mysterious ship called the Golden Fang, all
set against a Los Angeles whose mellow hippie glow of the ’60s has
been seriously harshed by the recently committed Manson Family
murders.

Some critics have called this novel Pynchon Lite, and maybe that is
so, but Inherent Vice is an enormously entertaining ride through a
time and place that are gone forever. Doc solves the mystery (sort
of), and you’ll have a fine time reading how he does it.

http://synapse.ucsf.edu/articles/2010/January/14/bookbag.html