NP but The Nix and possible Pynchon influence.

[Mark Kohut]

So, this talented young writer, Dickensian if you want a major writer
comparison,
seems to have read at least Inherent Vice and found an influence.

Bigfoot, that fictional embodiment of the change in our policing since the
sixties, the Watts riots
actually almost literally, wherein the LAPD, Radney Balko shows in his
book, reacted by stepping up their aggressive
pre-emptiveness and their militarism.

There is a woman, 60s small town type who escaped to Chicago from Iowa for
school but mostly, just about in time for the police action
known as the Democratic Convention. By which time, in school but
Free-n-Easy outside of it, she had been
hippie-pestered but attracted to, a tough young cop. Because we know women
are, even hippie women, right?
As I read of him thru my Pynchon fandom, he seems created on the page in
direct influence by. Major Dickens-plot stuff
happens between them at that historic convention.

Author spins ithe man-woman thing differently by the end of the novel,
however.
Decades later she gets karmic adjustment, maybe, against the old cop now a
judge.
 Overcomes him in life, who did change her life from its new, wider
possible course back when.

And its sorta a happy ending for all (with ambiguities).