Inherent Vice

by Henry Feltham | 4:08 am 23/08/2010

Author: Thomas Pynchon (4/5)

   When you are famous for writing difficult books, there will always be a handful of people who are going to be put off when you write a noir detective thriller, set in seventies surf-hippie Los Angeles (where, incidentally, Pynchon – age 79 – still lives, writes, and presumably smokes a lot of weed on some beach). It’s an unbecoming project for a Nobel Prize for Literature contender, they might say. But who cares about them anyway?

   The first 50 pages of Inherent Vice aren’t great, unfortunately. But if you can make it through the set up and the lists of things that Thomas Pynchon seems to feel duty bound to go on and on about – including psychotic acid trips, the texture of L.A. fog, and a lot of other present-tense nostalgia – this is a great book. About four chapters in, the plot really kicks into high gear: a rich guy with connections goes missing, a biker is killed, and a cult hovers behind everything. This is ultimate noir territory, done in Thomas Pynchon's characteristic impossibly surreal and yet matter-of-fact brogue. 

   As always, the storyline is involute and sprawling, taking in half-finished sixties dream cities, a surf band called The Boards, and a regular suggestion of incredible acts happening just off stage. That's the thing with Pynchon, of course: he never gives the game away completely. Always just ahead is the unmissable revelation that explains the entire plot. Of course, Pynchon is too much of a faded sixties hopeful to ever believe that a single idea, a single piece of information, can save us. His brand of detective thriller is the ever-unsolved mystery. The reader is deliberately denied cognitive closure. And as with all of Pynchon’s novels, this can feel unsatisfying. This book never quite comes together, as it were. But it is this unfinishedness, this incompleteness, this vague desire, this unspeakable something that always leaves the reader wondering ... and that's what he's writing about.

   It’s not for everyone, but then no books are. Fans of Pynchon’s other works should not worry too much; he’s not lost his mind yet. Indeed, this might serve as a good place to start reading Pynchon. It’s lighter than his other novels (and is therefore not quite representative of his work), so if you enjoy Inherent Vice, it’ll probably be worth tackling Pynchon’s denser, more complex novels.

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