Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
This review is going to begin with a very uncool admission. Make that an unhip admission. I’ve never read any Thomas Pynchon before Inherent Vice. Frankly, the idea of doing so terrified me. Maybe it’s not even the supposed difficulty of Pynchon that scares me, but how intimidating his ardent fans are. I mean, check out this complete, thorough wiki-style guide to every single reference in Inherent Vice. That takes some dedication. So, even though the story of Inherent Vice has intrigued me for a while now, I still approached it apprehensively.
Set in Los Angeles with the glory days of the revolutionary sixties behind him, Doc Sportello is a hippie detective who is drawn into a mysterious world of ex-cons, corrupt police, inspired property developers and ex-gambling addict limousine drivers. Approached by an ex-lover with a story about a suspected plot to kidnap her billionaire boyfriend, Doc heads into the unknown with only his wits and a steady supply of mind-altering drugs to guide him.
Much to my surprise, Inherent Vice is accessible. Not only is it accessible, it is compulsively readable – I found it difficult to put the book down and walk away. The storyline, while taking the usual twists and turns of detective fiction, is relatively straight forward. The references Pynchon makes are, for the most part, not too obscure, relying mainly on facets of popular culture. Doc himself is all too similar to the Dude from The Big Lebowski – owing probably a lot to the Dude like drawl of Pynchon himself in the book trailer. The writing is vivid, yet at the same time, faintly nostalgic:
“In every window, one by one as Japonica crept by, appeared a hippie freak or small party of hippie freaks, each listening on headphones to a different rock ‘n’ roll album and moving around at a different rhythm. Like Denis, Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence, and some of them later at the register would actually be spending money to hear rock ‘n’ roll. It seemed to Doc like some strange kind of dues or payback. More and more lately he’d been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side.”
Doc is a likable character, honest about himself and his habits, honest, perhaps too honest, in his business and able to maneuver the murky underworld of Los Angeles crime in a marijuana haze while never seemingly truly comprehending the danger present. The other characters are a curious group of ever-morphing criminals and surfers and stoners and police. The antagonism between the local police celebrity, Bigfoot Bjornsen, and Doc is hilarious, some of their banter is really, really funny:
“Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the Watts rioting you do—it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what’s bleeding but they don’t find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.”
Doc considered this for a bit. “What’s in ‘em lingonberries, Bigfoot?”
The plot, while knotty, never becomes entirely incomprehensible, as even Doc has a loose hold on what is or isn’t happening. It’s really an intensely enjoyable, paranoid trip. It almost gives me the necessary courage to tackle Pynchon’s other monolithic tomes.
Almost.