The Thousands

Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s return to the pysch-noir genre he laid the bones for in his classic novel, The Crying Of Lot 49. The tale is every bit as twisted, as thick with its detective trail meanderings as Lot 49, but more pulpy in its delivery as it conjures an image of a paranoidpost-Manson Los Angeles. As in some of my other favorite LA books – Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Fante’s Ask The Dust – the city of Los Angeles becomes a central character itself. Traversed, judged and combed over by stoner detective ‘Doc’ Sportello in a futile attempt to put the pieces together of an ambiguous chain of events beginning with the disappearance of an X girlfriend.

Pynchon’s references will be appreciated by anyone who is curious/familiar with this time period in LA – the Laurel Canyon scene, the clubs of Sunset Strip and the creative beach side enclaves long since given over to development are all explored with poetic accuracy. It’s a dense book, a Long Goodbye – the tale darkens, the narrative splinters, it gets ‘heavy’, you wonder where in the hell all the arteries could possibly connect, Doc’s own frustration with events is mirrored by the reader’s. But like him you have to persist to know – to get to the bottom and back out again.