I am readin now - with a delay of a couple of years - the above
mentioned Book of T. Pyncon.. It arrived last week from Amazon.uk with my
Olympus VR 320 new camera.. I won't summarise the plot. Other people have
done that superbly. What I'll offer instead, is my general, uninformed,
unexpert take on the book. As someone who's read a reasonable amount of
Pynchon, but who is - by no means - a Pynchon fanatic..
I liked the critic of NY Times from MICHIKO KAKUTANI Aug, 3 2009 Review with title Another Doorway to the Paranoid Pynchon Dimension.. "..Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” is a big, clunky time machine of a novel that transports us back to the early 1970s, back to a California of surfers and surf bunnies, bikers and biker chicks, hippies, freaks and righteous potheads. It was a time when people lived for Acapulco gold and Panama red and lived on pizza and Hostess Twinkies, a time when girls wore their hair long and their skirts short, guys wore paisley and velour and suede, and people were constantly monitoring their paranoia levels and worrying about narcs and cops and the feds.. "“Inherent Vice” is a simple shaggy-dog detective story that pits likable dopers against the Los Angeles Police Department and its “countersubversive” agents, a novel in which paranoia is less a political or metaphysical state than a byproduct of smoking too much weed. Doc’s cases lead him to a Las Vegas casino, a rock ’n’ roll band’s Los Angeles digs, a tacky massage parlor, an Asian-theme club in San Pedro, an abandoned utopian village in the desert, a New Age retreat near Ojai and back and forth across the Los Angeles freeways, giving the reader a tour of the city in its post-Manson, paranoiac phase. Mr. Pynchon does a vivid, surprisingly naturalistic job of delineating the city around 1970 — the year the Lakers lost to the Knicks in Game 7 — capturing the laid-back, slightly seedy aura of a metropolis that was still a magnet for drifters, dreamers and dopers, and not yet in thrall to blockbuster movies and multiplexes and Rodeo Drive money. The characters in this novel, however, are decidedly less three-dimensional. With the exception of Doc, who has a vague, poignant charm, they bear less of a resemblance to the fully human heroes of “Mason & Dixon” than to the flimsy paper dolls who populated much of his earlier fiction: collections of funny Pynchonian names, bizarre tics, weird occupations and weirder sexual predilections. Many seem to exist for no reason other than that Mr. Pynchon dreamed them up and inserted them into the story, to fill up space or to act as vague red herrings in Doc’s quest to find Shasta and ensure her safety..."
I like Pynchon. A lot. I love the depth and complexity of his writing. I love the feeling of ploughing through a deep, rich, fertile text absolutely jam-packed with Significance. Replete with allusions, half-allusions, hintings, suggestions... Comments that you'd need to go 400 pages back, in order to recall the full significance of the full in-text meaning... without beginning to consider what they might otherwise mean in a broader, deeper, fuller context...
I love the fact that I've given up on most Pynchon books at least once. But have always been drawn back to them. Wanting to read them, understand them, approach them, immerse myself in them... to understand at least some of their meaning. With the hope that a second, third, fourth reading will uncover another layer, and another layer, and another layer... I have started Gravity's Rainbow 9 times, and got to the end on three. That isn't because it's a bad book; it's because of the layers of flowing, suggesting, rhythmic density have lost me sometimes...
In Inherent Vice, all of that is gone. All of it. What's left reads - to me - like a juvenalia fest. Strip out all the effort, depth, complexity and difficulty from a Pynchon novel, and what have you got left...?
But I keep on getting this feeling of 'why am I bothering?'
But... as someone who wants to read Pynchon because he writes in a different way... to be lost, amazed, bewildered, amused, perplexed, delighted, confounded, confused... this just is not it. Not by a long stretch..
@ the end here's the backpage plot summarize story :
"It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.."..!!
