Inherent Vice

Starred review from July 6, 2009
Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry “Doc” Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. We’re in early-’70s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon’s recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away.
It all starts with Pynchon’s least conspicuous intro ever: “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to”—she being Doc’s old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big’s strings is always a villain even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon’s unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard’s exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there’s a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly suggestive setting, the novel’s bones need only a touch of the screenwriter’s dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American literature’s most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable.
Inherent Vice
deepens Pynchon’s developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49
and Vineland
with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition—yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he’s more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V
; Gravity’s Rainbow
; Mason & Dixon
; Against the Day
). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific.

July 1, 2009
For better and worse, this is the closest Pynchon is likely to come to a beach book.

A psychedelic beach book, of course: It's hippie-era Los Angeles, and our hero smokes marijuana the way others smoke cigarettes, which is something of an occupational hazard in a profession that requires deductive abilities. About a third the length of its predecessor (Against the Day, 2006, etc.) and as breezy as a detective novel by Tom Robbins, the book begins with a beautiful woman walking into the office of private investigator Larry"Doc" Sportello to ask for help. Formerly Doc's girlfriend, Shasta has been associating more recently with Mickey Wolfmann, a very rich and married developer whom Doc knows from the newspapers as"the real estate big shot." Mickey's wife and her lover apparently want him institutionalized, but as usual in a Pynchon novel, there are conspiracies atop conspiracies as Doc tries to get to the people who are running the people who seem to be running things. With Charlie Manson poisoning the free-love ethos and land-grab developers putting the soul of Southern California up for grabs, Doc finds himself enmeshed deeper in a plot that defies resolution. The mystery focuses on the Golden Fang, which may be a schooner, a heroin cartel, an enterprise of"vertical integration" or a vast international conspiracy. Maybe all of the above. The story will make the most sense to those as stoned as Doc, though it's hard to resist questions like,"Anybody understand why they call it'real' estate?" or a simile such as"the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time"—highly appropriate for a protagonist who tends to divide the totality of experience into"groovy" and"bummer." Or, once, for emphasis,"Bumm. Er."

Groovier than much of this erratic author's fiction, but a bummer compared with his best.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from August 15, 2009
So Doc Sportello, inveterate doper and sometime private eye, is sitting around hazy L.A. at the end of the Sixties when he gets a visit from former flame Shasta. Seems she's been seeing developer-turned-visionary Mickey Wolfmann, whose wife and boyfriend are cooking up a scheme to kidnap Wolfmann and want to cut her in. Meanwhile, black ex-con Tariq wants Doc's help in hooking up with Glen Charlock, a White Aryan he did business with behind bars, and he's pretty bummed that Channel Vista Estates, Wolfmann's latest development, has wiped out his neighborhood. Doc heads for Channel Vista, where he might have encountered Charlock had he not blacked out (it's those drugs?). Instead, Charlock winds up dead; Doc has another run-in with friendly nemesis Lt. Det. Bigfoot Bjornsen; and Wolfmann disappears. So, for that matter, does Shasta. And it gets even more complicated as Doc is off on one very weird acid trip of an investigation. VERDICT With whip-smart, psychedelic-bright language, Pynchon manages to convey the Sixtiesexcept the Sixties were never really like this. This is Pynchon's world, and it's brilliant. The resolution is as crisp as Doc is laid-back. Highly recommended.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2009
Did I say that out loud? Doc Sportello asks. Its hard to keep things straight when youre high. Unlike his hard-core L.A. noir compatriots, this private eyes primary vice is pot, not booze. Its the roach-end of the 1960s, and the sole proprietor and employee of LSD Investigations (Location, Surveillance, Detection) uses the flare of his bellbottoms to conceal his gun and muses, A private eye didnt drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops. And doesnt he milk his spaced-out pothead persona for everything its worth as he searches for missing construction mogul Mickey Wolfmann. Docs haphazard (or is it?) investigation is complicated by his nemesis, a cop called Bigfoot Bjornsen; Docs persistent feelings for his ex and affair with a district attorney; memory lapses; and hallucinations. Pynchon is frolicking in this psychedelic mystery, featuring dopers, surfers, bikers, predators, and parasites, drugs and counterfeit money, setups and switchbacks, and the Golden Fang, a stealth ship. As Doc wiggles and smokes his way out of gnarly predicaments, Pynchon skewers urban renewal, television, government surveillance, and the looming computer age. A bit of a mystery himself, master writer Pynchon has created a bawdy, hilarious, and compassionate electric-acid-noir satire spiked with passages of startling beauty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)