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I'm writing in the first week of August. Three nights ago, I started Thomas Pynchon's just-published novel Inherent Vice, completing it the following night. You won't have this issue of Books & Culture in your hands until several weeks later, by which time—if you are a Pynchonian—you will already have read the novel twice, maybe three times, even if it isn't among your personal favorites. (My own list would start with The Crying of Lot 49, followed by Against the Day.) You may have visited the Inherent Vice wiki, maybe even contributed an annotation or two. In that case, you won't mind spoilers, though you may be bored. If you haven't read the novel yet but think you might, turn the page for now. And if you haven't read the novel, have no intention of doing so (Pynchon isn't your cup of tea, or you don't read much fiction at all), but are still interested in a report, proceed to the next paragraph.
Inherent Vice is set in 1970 in a fictitious Southern California town, Gordita Beach (mentioned in Pynchon's 1990 novel, Vineland, and bearing a resemblance to Manhattan Beach), where the protagonist, Larry "Doc" Sportello, is a private eye: "The sign on his door read LSD Investigations, LSD, as he explained when people asked, which was not often, standing for 'Location, Surveillance, Detection.'" Imagine Philip Marlowe as a laid-back dope-smoking "gumsandal," much less physically impressive than the Chandler prototype, on the short side in fact, but winsome in his own way, and you begin to get the picture. Sure enough, the book begins with Doc, like Marlowe and Lew Archer before him, visited by a client of sorts:
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking like she swore she'd never look.
In addition to framing the book as an homage to and parody of the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, and the offshoots thereof, this opening paragraph suggests that we will be getting a morality play pitting flatlanders, denizens of "straightworld," against the free spirits of Gordita Beach, who will inevitably be crushed. Some early readers of the novel have described its mood as nostalgic—mourning the loss of "the Sixties," yes, but with an emphasis on savoring that moment in time with Pynchon's enjoyably fanatical attention to detail, memorializing even the most obscure surf bands. And of course there are the Pynchonian names: Ensenada Slim and Coy Harlingen, Dr. Blatnoyd and Dr. Threeply, Detective Lieutenant Bigfoot Bjornsen, LAPD, and Trillium Fortnight, one of the most affecting characters in the tale, who teaches music theory at UCLA and moonlights as "a woodwind specialist in early-music ensemble gigs. 'Anything from a double-quint pommer down to a sopranino shawm, I'm your person.'" Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker ("Soft-Boiled," his review is wonderfully titled), concludes that "Inherent Vice is generally a light-hearted affair" even as he acknowledges "familiar apocalyptic touches."
With Pynchon, a first reading is a reconnaissance, but my first impression of the book, for what it's worth, is quite different. That may have something to do with my confirmed loathing for druggie narratives (fiction, nonfiction, anything in between) and stoner humor. Obviously Pynchon relishes all this. Still, what I felt most strongly while reading the novel was a visceral sense of sadness and fallenness, human fallenness (my own included), like a bad smell—rotten potatoes, say—that's hard to get out of your nostrils for a long time after you have taken it in. Maybe that isn't what Pynchon intended at all, but it seems to follow from the story itself, and moreover it seems to implicate the cool folk, the refugees from straightworld, every bit as much as their uptight counterparts. (The fate of Trillium Fortnight is a case in point.)
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