Thomas Pynchon is one of America’s greatest living writers. His THE CRYING OF LOT 49 should be required teaching in high school, and his MASON & DIXON is one of the truly great underrated masterpieces. But his recent dip into genre fiction, INHERENT VICE, may lead some readers to worry: Will it be as literarily obscure as GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, or could there even be a level of condescension present?
Well, no worries, chaps. INHERENT VICE is one of the author’s most accessible and books, all while maintaining the expected Pynchonian level of description, misdirection, humor and undeniably intricate plotting. The novel is set in the Los Angeles of 1970, at the tail end of the psychedelic ’60s and the beginning of the brand-dominant ’70s, all the details of which Pynchon spreads liberally throughout, referencing TV shows, California idiosyncrasies and historical milestones, thoroughly submerging the reader into the stoner culture of his characters.
Hippie P.I. “Doc” Sportello, baked to the gills, tries to help his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Shasta, who quickly goes missing, and he ends up wading into extremely deep waters that involve the LAPD and an enigmatic group of gangster dentists called the Golden Fang. Shasta re-emerges in the story fairly quickly, but Sportello is now entangled in a conspiracy that deepens in part because of his own inherent, drug-fueled paranoia.
The story has its twists and turns, as well as the usual confusion in which Pynchon delights: the half-told tale, the indirect reference, the introduction of other worlds. The drug culture surrounding this VICE helps out a lot with that. He is also a master of dialogue, hiding intimate knowledge in each character’s call and response — a realistic, if somewhat tricky to follow, technique that heightens the mystery.
Indulge me for a moment now in what I consider to be Pynchon’s unparalleled skill: the art of description. In so many works, description tends to be either bland or purple-flowered, and it’s rarely used to properly further the story. Pynchon is absolutely crazy in his descriptions, so thorough with each word carefully chosen, layered just so, that he often makes his settings a character in themselves. Witness this shot of a somewhat over-the-hill casino that Doc enters:
“Doc got out and strolled under a Byzantine archway and into the seedy vastness of the main gaming floor, dominated by a ruinous chandelier draped above the tables and cages and pits, disintegrating, ghostly, huge, and if it had feelings, likely resentful — its lightbulbs long burned out and unreplaced, crystal lusters falling off unexpectedly into cowboy hatbrims, people’s drinks, and spinning roulette wheels, where they bounced with a hard-edged jingling through their own dramas of luck and loss. Everything in the room was lopsided one way or another. The ancient bearings on the roulette wheels made them spin erratically faster and slower. The classic three-reel slots, set long ago to payout percentages unknown south of Bonanza Road and perhaps to the world, had since each drifted in its own way, like small-town businessfolks, toward openhanded generosity or tightfisted meanness. The carpets, deep royal purple, had been retextured over the years with a million cigarette burns, each fusing the synthetic nap to a single tiny smear of plastic. The all-over effect was of wind on the surface of a lake. The level of the main floor was ten feet below that of the desert outside, providing natural insulation, so the chill in this vast indeterminate space wasn’t all from air-conditioning, which had been set on low in any case to save current.”
If you’ve been leery of Pynchon, cast aside your wariness and get this book. Lose yourself in his own peculiar madness, and move from here to his other tales. It is the author remarkably at both his best and his most readable. —Mark Rose
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