Thomas PynchonAnother Doorway to the Paranoid Pynchon Dimension
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
A review from
INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon
369 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
August 4, 2009
Books of The Times
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.
Compared with “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “V.” or “Mason & Dixon,” this novel is Pynchon Lite. Those earlier books featured intricate, mazelike narratives and enigmatic confrontations between what he has called “average poor bastards” and emissaries of “an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing.” In contrast, “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.
“Inherent Vice” not only reminds us how rooted Mr. Pynchon’s authorial vision is in the ’60s and ’70s, but it also demystifies his work, underscoring the similarities that his narratives — which mix high and low cultural allusions, silly pranks and gnomic historical references, mischievous puns, surreal dreamlike sequences and a playful sense of the absurd — share with the work of artists like Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and even Richard Brautigan.
Like “Vineland,” his other ode to the counterculture era, this novel conjures a California where characters talk in the trippy, spaced-out language of the frequently stoned and lead wacky, slacker-type existences. It’s a California reminiscent of the one Tom Wolfe depicted in “The Pump House Gang” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” a place that stands in sharp contrast to the capitalistic conformity of the “Midol America” that Mr. Pynchon had suggested would arrive in the Reaganite ’80s. The hero of “Inherent Vice” worries that “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness,” that “everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end,” with the “faithless, money-driven world” reasserting “its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle and molest.”
If “Vineland” read like a user-friendly companion piece to “The Crying of Lot 49,” then “Inherent Vice” reads like a workmanlike improvisation on “Vineland.” Once again the plot is propelled by a search for a missing woman, a former hippie who consorted with an incongruous representative of the capitalistic power grid. And once again there are efforts by the powers-that-be to turn hippies and potheads to the dark side, to turn them into informants through re-education programs or the enticement of money.
In this case the hero is one Doc Sportello, a private eye — that is a gumshoe, or as another character says, a “gumsandal” — who gets a request from his former girlfriend Shasta Fay to look into a plot against her current boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann, a real estate big shot. Soon Shasta and Mickey have vanished, and Doc finds their disappearance converging with his other cases: a search for an ex-con named Glen Charlock, who was one of Mickey’s bodyguards, and a search for a former rock musician named Coy Harlingen, who supposedly died of a heroin overdose but may still be alive.
On top of dealing with his nemesis, Detective Lt. Bigfoot Bjornsen, Doc must contend with sinister emissaries of a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may be an Indochinese heroin cartel or a shadowy holding company or a syndicate set up by dentists as a tax dodge. He also investigates a hit man “specializing in politicals — black and Chicano activists, antiwar protesters, campus bombers and assorted other pinko” radicals. Mr. Pynchon’s picaresque plots, of course, are Christmas trees on which he can hang all sorts of ornaments, tinsel, garlands and flashing lights, and the plot of “Inherent Vice” is no exception. There are yards and yards of stoned conversations in which people wonder why there is “Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm” and talk about “doorways to other dimensions” or a lost continent called Lemuria, “the Atlantis of the Pacific.”
There are also coy, self-referential allusions to earlier Pynchon novels, like a “catapult mail delivery” system, “courrier par lance-coco,” that recalls the alternative mail system in “The Crying of Lot 49”; and “a cosmic insane Surfaris laugh” that comes screaming “across the sky,” and reminds us of the opening of “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
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.
Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.” — and their juxtapositions of nihilism and conspiracymongering, Dionysian chaos and Apollonian reason, anarchic freedom and the machinery of power — to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system. Not surprisingly, the reader is encouraged, as one character observes, referring to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip, to “root for Ignatz,” the anarchic, brick-hurling mouse, not Officer Pupp, the emissary of order and law.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
A review from
INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon
369 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
August 4, 2009
Books of The Times
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.
Compared with “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “V.” or “Mason & Dixon,” this novel is Pynchon Lite. Those earlier books featured intricate, mazelike narratives and enigmatic confrontations between what he has called “average poor bastards” and emissaries of “an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing.” In contrast, “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.
“Inherent Vice” not only reminds us how rooted Mr. Pynchon’s authorial vision is in the ’60s and ’70s, but it also demystifies his work, underscoring the similarities that his narratives — which mix high and low cultural allusions, silly pranks and gnomic historical references, mischievous puns, surreal dreamlike sequences and a playful sense of the absurd — share with the work of artists like Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and even Richard Brautigan.
Like “Vineland,” his other ode to the counterculture era, this novel conjures a California where characters talk in the trippy, spaced-out language of the frequently stoned and lead wacky, slacker-type existences. It’s a California reminiscent of the one Tom Wolfe depicted in “The Pump House Gang” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” a place that stands in sharp contrast to the capitalistic conformity of the “Midol America” that Mr. Pynchon had suggested would arrive in the Reaganite ’80s. The hero of “Inherent Vice” worries that “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness,” that “everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end,” with the “faithless, money-driven world” reasserting “its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle and molest.”
If “Vineland” read like a user-friendly companion piece to “The Crying of Lot 49,” then “Inherent Vice” reads like a workmanlike improvisation on “Vineland.” Once again the plot is propelled by a search for a missing woman, a former hippie who consorted with an incongruous representative of the capitalistic power grid. And once again there are efforts by the powers-that-be to turn hippies and potheads to the dark side, to turn them into informants through re-education programs or the enticement of money.
In this case the hero is one Doc Sportello, a private eye — that is a gumshoe, or as another character says, a “gumsandal” — who gets a request from his former girlfriend Shasta Fay to look into a plot against her current boyfriend, Mickey Wolfmann, a real estate big shot. Soon Shasta and Mickey have vanished, and Doc finds their disappearance converging with his other cases: a search for an ex-con named Glen Charlock, who was one of Mickey’s bodyguards, and a search for a former rock musician named Coy Harlingen, who supposedly died of a heroin overdose but may still be alive.
On top of dealing with his nemesis, Detective Lt. Bigfoot Bjornsen, Doc must contend with sinister emissaries of a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may be an Indochinese heroin cartel or a shadowy holding company or a syndicate set up by dentists as a tax dodge. He also investigates a hit man “specializing in politicals — black and Chicano activists, antiwar protesters, campus bombers and assorted other pinko” radicals. Mr. Pynchon’s picaresque plots, of course, are Christmas trees on which he can hang all sorts of ornaments, tinsel, garlands and flashing lights, and the plot of “Inherent Vice” is no exception. There are yards and yards of stoned conversations in which people wonder why there is “Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm” and talk about “doorways to other dimensions” or a lost continent called Lemuria, “the Atlantis of the Pacific.”
There are also coy, self-referential allusions to earlier Pynchon novels, like a “catapult mail delivery” system, “courrier par lance-coco,” that recalls the alternative mail system in “The Crying of Lot 49”; and “a cosmic insane Surfaris laugh” that comes screaming “across the sky,” and reminds us of the opening of “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
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.
Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.” — and their juxtapositions of nihilism and conspiracymongering, Dionysian chaos and Apollonian reason, anarchic freedom and the machinery of power — to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system. Not surprisingly, the reader is encouraged, as one character observes, referring to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip, to “root for Ignatz,” the anarchic, brick-hurling mouse, not Officer Pupp, the emissary of order and law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/books/04kaku.html
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