IV Random thoughts

[Joseph Tracy]

Many reviewers and some listers have majored on a Cheech and Chong,, ha ha dumb stoners playing detective, approach to IV.  Ok, maybe, but the way Sportello unpacks his multilayered investigation of  LA/West Coast/ American entry to the  70's cosmos is pretty damn sophisticated and Sportello in some sense represents the intelligence of a generation that may have been smoking some serious shit but saw through the war propaganda, and was correctly skeptical about the Nixon/ Reagan  economics, and Father knows best kill the commies psychology and the whole package of tube-fare anaesthezia  that facilitated the rise of the criminal far right into the center of world power and ended whatever remained of a politically  anti-fascist progressivism in the US. ( I am using fascism here as Mussolini used it to describe an aggressive world seizing union of government and corporate power)

I would argue that  the stoner jokes are  a smoke screen for a serious attempt to use what might be called the soft boiled or possibly sunny side up detective genre to look at some of the real criminality of the cultural period it explores. Sportello ends up pointing at some real issues that are with us still. The revival of a  McCarthyist police state, the hollowing and financialization of the economy, a war on drugs run by a government funding its secret police with heroin money, the power of ultra rich capitalists like H Hughes to assassinate and silence opposition, the war to control the internet, the violence against whistleblowers, the flow of wealth to the 1%, the inherent child abuse of much american culture, the omnipresence of porn and pop during a period of supposed cultural conservatism and return to family values. All this and underlying everything, debt, lies and violence.  

Most reviewers don't talk about these things, not because they are not in the novel, but because most reviewers never talk about anything politically  or socially substantive or potentially abrasive, preferring to stay safely in the domain of  apolitical humanist literary talk. This timidity infects writers too.  Shut up, shut up, don't talk about anything not safely trivial.