What are we to make of Thomas Pynchon? His most recent novel, Inherent Vice, has no overt pretensions to being anything other than a weightless amusement. Which is just fine with me, because that’s all I ever got out of any of his previous works.
Pynchon has a reputation for being a Serious Author, who has Important Things to say about how we got to where we are today, and just where it is we’ve ended up. He also has a reputation for being – whether on purpose or by accident it’s never altogether clear – obtuse. The obscurity arises from both his writing style and his choice of subjects. When he chooses, he lets his sentences grow to paragraph length, meandering through time, space and characters. He might start in, say, 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair with some fictitious balloonists, ramble through France reflecting on Napoleon, and end up somewhere in the stratosphere in the late 21st century. Along the way, metaphors get flexed, compared to each other, and forgotten by the wayside. One suspects he’s even forgotten the point he’s making, but, behold! turn the page, and he gives a wink, then zeros down in less than a clause to some Truth or other.
This current incarnation of Pynchon projects little of what I’ve come to enjoy from him. His sentences are often short, to the point, and move the action forward (note I did not say “plot”). Conversations among characters are more often than not easily followed, with little need for ping-ponging back up to see just who is saying what to whom. The typeface is normal sized, the book a manageable 369 pages, and the story remains anchored in time and space. I mean, I like being entertainingly confused (as distinct from being confusedly entertained.) That is, I enjoy purposeful obfuscation in pursuit of a distant, but recognizable endpoint. And no one obfuscates better than TP. It’s just that he hides his obfuscation better here.
That’s because he’s chosen to set Inherent Vice within the confines of a detective novel. This allows him to keep information and links among characters hidden from the reader. It also excuses him from having a plot one can actually track.
The story is set in Los Angeles, primarily in the beach cities, in June of 1970. In the background, the trial of Charles Manson for the Sharon Tate killings gets underway, and the New York Knicks and LA Lakers fight it out in the NBA Finals. Larry “Doc” Sportello works fitfully as a private detective out of the fictional Gordita Beach, which seems to lie somewhere between Playa del Ray and Manhattan Beach.
Doc is presented as a classic hippie, a long-haired, music loving drug experimenter. Pynchon follows many of the genre’s conventions, warped a bit through a cannabis haze. Bigfoot Bjornsen, a hippie-hating LA cop, trails Doc, extorting him for info whenever Doc, as is required of all PIs, inadvertently appears at the scenes of various seemingly unrelated crimes. Several femme fatales employ Doc to find the men who have disappeared from their lives. One, of course, is an old girl friend of Doc’s, looking for Mickey Wolfmann, her new flame. Another is convinced her husband (Coy Harlingen), a sax player in the legendary surf band, “The Boards”, didn’t really die in a heroin overdose. A third seeks Puck Beaverton who, despite his prison romance with cell mate Einar, is the lost lustful love of her life.
None of this, of course, is very clear on first reading. Because Pynchon retains not only his whimsical naming conventions, but also his penchant for dropping new plot lines and characters seemingly at random into the stew, with no preparation, forewarning, or even after-the-fact connection. Thankfully, he also includes the obligatory summing up scene near the end, just in case the reader actually cares about having the dots connected. But he sort of draws dashed lines in random patterns among the dots, rather than actually filling us in.
Because the story, and even the characters, are not what Pynchon has ever been interested in. His real power is his desire for and success at mainlining an altered view of reality straight into the reader’s limbic nodes. His writing has always seemed psychedelic before; now, he’s just making it obvious. Doc is clearly the primary focus of this book, front and center at all times, and Doc’s neural connections may have been fried one too many times. This is actually a plus, as it helps him survive an intentional PCP dosing by Puck, who clearly means to eliminate the wayward private eye. Doc becomes our guide through the tag end of the sixties in surfside LA, a time and place far more riven with drugs and generational chaos than Haight Ashbury ever was.
I arrived in LA just 3 months after this story ends, and I saw the carnage wrought by drugs gone wild. The Manson trial is one of those dots which makes this clear. Pynchon in very sympathetic to Doc’s struggles to make sense of his world, all the while functioning with a brain gone non-linear after one too many acid/mescaline/hashish trips. In the end, apparently, only a PI who can’t think clearly could make sense of LA in those days, and of the secretive corruption among the ruling elites vaguely hinted at.
The title? Here’s Pynchon’s explanation, dropped on us near the end of this circus:
… what lawyers in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.
“Is that like original sin?”, Doc wondered.
“It’s what you can’t avoid,” Sauncho [Doc’s lawyer – think Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas] said, “stuff marine policies don’t like to cover. Usually applies to cargo – like eggs break – but sometimes it’s also the vessel carrying it. Like why bilges have to be pumped out?”
“Like the San Andreas Fault,” it occurred to Doc.
I think Pynchon is saying the book is about the things you can’t control, that can go wrong in a place like Los Angeles, at the tail end of the ‘60s.
If you’ve never read any Pynchon, this is actually a good place to start. If you’re a fan, don’t try to take this one too seriously.