Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve By WALTER KIRN

Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve
By WALTER KIRN*
August 23, 2009

A review of
INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon
369 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95

The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself.
What allows the detectives to penetrate these schemes is not their intelligence, chiefly, but their autonomy. Private eyes are skeptics and outsiders, their isolation the secret of their vision. Doc Sportello, the mellow gumshoe hero of Thomas Pynchon's “Inherent Vice” — a psychedelic homage to Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler set in the last days of hippie-era Los Angeles, after the Manson murders have spoiled the vibe — lives, like his old-school models, on the margins, unaffiliated and unencumbered. His funky little hometown, Gordita Beach, is perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, its back turned squarely on America, both geographically and culturally. The town is a haven for dropouts, freaks and misfits who don’t so much live outside the law but as though the law had never been invented. For Doc, who stumbled into the detective trade and found that it suited his easygoing lifestyle, his beach bum neighbors are ideal clients, prone to getting into minor jams but disinclined to stir up serious trouble. This keeps Doc’s workload relatively light, freeing him to stay stoned around the clock and live in the now, which isn’t hard for him, because he’s toked away his short-term memory. It’s a wonder he can still function as a person, let alone make a living as a sleuth. He nods off during stakeouts, draws blanks while quizzing witnesses and can’t seem to turn down the volume on the surf music playing incessantly inside his head.
If Doc sounds like a literary joke — the Private Eye with drooping lids who can’t trust the evidence of his own senses — then he must be a joke with a lesson to impart, since Pynchon isn’t the type to make us laugh unless he’s really out to make us think. Even in “V.” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the colossal novels of ideas that have inspired a thousand dissertations as unreadable as the books are said to be but actually aren’t, he grounds his intellectualism in humor and livens it up with allusions to pop culture while sacrificing none of its deep rigor. He’s our literature’s best metaphysical comedian. The weighty points his work makes about the universe — that it’s slowly winding down as the Big Bang becomes the Final Sigh — tend to relieve our despair, not deepen it, by letting us in on the cosmos’s greatest gags: for example, that the purpose of the Creation was to make itself perfectly unmanageable and purely unintelligible. No wonder so many of Pynchon’s characters revel in chemical dissipation. Entropy — if you can’t beat it, join it.
That’s Doc’s way, at least, and once the plot gets rolling (spurred by the search for a missing land developer whom his trampy ex-girlfriend has a thing for), the story takes on the shape of his derangement, squirting along from digression to digression and periodically pausing for dope-head gabfests of preposterous intensity on subjects including the ontological subtleties of “The Wizard of Oz” and the potential re-emergence of the sunken continent of Lemuria. Pynchon’s ear for the atonal music of attention deficit disorder is both pitch perfect and extremely patient, as in this riff on the semiotic nuances of StarKist’s Charlie the Tuna: “It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty.” These manic outbursts aren’t arbitrary, of course, but cluster around the novel’s core concern with the waning of the Summer of Love, when all was balmy and celestial, into the chilly Autumn of Authority, which Pynchon implies has yet to end. Some readers will tire of this high nonsense, however, despite its skillful orchestration and period authenticity. Pothead humor, whatever its guilty pleasures, hasn’t evolved much over the last half century, and what was once its charming wackiness has succumbed to orthodoxy. It still relies on vast epiphanies aroused by fleeting trivialities and suddenly interrupted by junk-food cravings. One minute all the great puzzles have been solved, especially those that never puzzled anyone, and the next moment everyone’s pigging out on carbs and lighting their cigarettes from the wrong end.
Like the stoned symposium on tuna, Doc’s manhunt for the AWOL billionaire eventually spirals off into absurdity, becoming a collage of trippy interludes peopled by all manner of goofs and lowlifes. These scenes only fitfully advance the narrative and sometimes cause us to forget there is one. But that’s as expected, since Pynchon doesn’t write plots; instead, he devises suggestive webs of circumstance whose meanings depend on the angles from which they’re viewed and can seem ominous and banal by turns, like so many situations in life. In Pynchon, the problem of distinguishing between coincidences and conspiracies, between the prosaic and the profound, is one of the defining tasks of consciousness. For some, like Doc, whose cerebral equipment is particularly unreliable, this perennial mental challenge can prove insuperable, but that may be why Pynchon chose him for the job. His confusion is all of ours exaggerated, his paranoia a version of normal pattern­making amped way up by his intake of hallucinogens. That doesn’t mean he’s blind, though, or delusional. Hyper-awareness makes sense at times, especially when, as in 1970 (the year in which the book is set), the times are changing more rapidly than usual and were radically out of joint to start with.
The grand conclusion of Doc’s nonlinear sleuthing, the revelation he stumbles on despite himself, is that he and his freedom-loving kinfolk (the private eye and the hippie, we finally see, are related as outcast seekers of the truth) have been boxed in by the squares, their natural foes, and will henceforth be monitored with their own consent, to assure their own ostensible safety. The oppressors’ specific methods and identities continue to mystify Doc to some degree (they include the Internet, it seems, which appears in the novel in a nascent version, as the plaything of a techno-hobbyist), but he divines their overarching goal: to close the frontiers of consciousness forever by rendering life in the shadows impossible and opening the soul itself to view, or at least criminalizing its excursions into deeply subjective, hidden realms. The age of the private eyes is over, that is, and with it the age of privacy itself. And what’s left? The sleepless, all-seeing, unblinking public eye.

*Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Kirn-t.html