<sup>Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon
Hardcover: 384 pages
Penguin Press HC
(August 4th, 2009)


'Yeah, PIs should really stay away from drugs, all ’em alternate universes just make the job that much more complicated.'

—Fritz Drybeam, Inherent Vice</sup>


Did Thomas Pynchon write Vineland, the most cartoonish and tangential novel to carry his name? No. Or, perhaps more accurately, most Thomas Pynchons did not write Vineland. Likewise, it’s safe to say the Pynchon of Against the Day did not write Inherent Vice. Which of these Pynchons is responsible for this late, relatively breezy work? Inherent Vice bears some resemblance to Vineland’s countercultural fantasia, and is perhaps a distant cousin to his California-paranoia, shaggy dog story, The Crying of Lot 49. Nevertheless, all of these works take place in Pynchonia, an ever-expanding multi-verse that cannot be contained even in the weightiest of this oeuvre’s tomes.

Pynchon has always been a genre enthusiast, even as he tends to blenderize his registers. In this case, he shows us that a psychedelic detective story isn’t just colorized noir. Inherent Vice’s protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello, is a borderline narcoleptic private investigator approaching thirty, about the age Pynchon was at the dawn of the ’70s, when the novel is set. Prone to inopportune, dope-fueled fits of deep sleep, Doc routinely nods off to find himself in other worlds: some nostalgic, some fantastic, some auguring a bleak eternal recurrence.
 
Halfway through the neon dream of Inherent Vice, the lights go out and Doc is transported from hyper-colored ’60s to monochrome ’50s. Along the way, he undergoes an appropriate change of wardrobe, transforming from a hippie-fro’d and pizza-stained bubble-gumshoe into a fully-decked dick in a fedora and vintage John Garfield suit (mismatched with a sequined Liberace tie, a souvenir Doc picks up on his trip). Later, maritime lawyer and paranoid TV junkie Sauncho Smilax provides inadvertent commentary on the transition when he freaks out over the shift from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz—“[I]f that’s what we see, what’s happening with Dorothy? What’s her ‘normal’ Kansas color changing into?” Pynchon’s dialogue has always been arch, pop-culture damaged, and/or downright goofy, so he expertly splices hippie-speak, surfer-tude, and hardboiled banter. He’s at his best when he keeps Inherent Vice talking.

Pynchon may be camera shy, even reclusive, but his novels are lively and every bit as strange and polyvocal as the world outside his head. Munching personal-sized pizzas with a fellow traveler in Pynchonia at a Greenwich Village restaurant, I recently compared notes on narrative structure and tone in various Pynchon novels. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has a long, arching shape to the narrative that reflects the novel’s preoccupation with parabolic rocket trajectories; it’s a further development of the yo-yoing eternal pursuit of Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963). Similarly, the structure of Mason & Dixon (1997) matches its subject matter (the problematic establishment of the Mason-Dixon Line), and lays down a messy horizontal time line. Against the Day (2006), framed by a hot-air-balloon adventure tale, has an omni-directional, inter-dimensional narrative vectoring toward lateral realities. Vineland (1990), which some have found to be the most un-Pynchonlike of the lot (fringe theories suggest it was ghost written), reads like a series of comi-tragic digressions. Inherent Vice nods to many Pynchonian tropes, and the shiftiness of the plot relies on elements of strategies past, particularly those of The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland. This time around, Pynchon’s narrative frame is a look back at something peering forward out of the haze, an intoxicating cloud of unknowing.