'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-thomas-pynchon2-2009aug02,0,6295118.story

BOOK REVIEW
'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon
Southern California's 1960s past reemerges from the haze in this Chandler-like tale, set in the age of cannabis.
By Carolyn Kellogg
August 2, 2009

"Inherent Vice" is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era's end. This, of course, is exactly the kind of layered meaning that readers expect of Pynchon.

His fans tend to be drawn to either his massive, bafflingly complex efforts -- the iconic, National Book Award-winning "Gravity's Rainbow," "Mason & Dixon" and "Against the Day" -- or to the more constrained, plot-driven narratives of "Vineland" or "The Crying of Lot 49." It is the big books, with their parades of gloriously obtuse set pieces, full of slapstick and conspiracy and minutely researched ephemera, that established Pynchon as a writer worthy of intense inquiry. Yet having a plot doesn't make his work any less brilliant, any less Pynchonian. "Inherent Vice" is a perfect case in point. It has a plot. It has a main character. This clear structure will, no doubt, disappoint the big-book boosters, the obsessives who began contributing to the online wiki annotation of "Against the Day" before finishing its 1,085 pages. But maybe we should all take a hit off a fat spliff and enjoy the dirty, brainy achievement of Pynchon's "Vice."

At the center of "Inherent Vice" is Doc Sportello, a low-key private investigator living in a dingy bachelor pad in Gordita, a beach community with Venice's grit and Malibu's surfers and hills. He has little affection for nonhippie flatlanders and a love of good weed. But Doc is more law and order than his indica might indicate: His occasional girlfriend is an assistant district attorney, and he's got an enduring across-the-divide, almost-friendship with Bigfoot Bjornsen, an LAPD detective who does Cal Worthington-like TV spots on the side. It's these straight-world connections that bring Doc's ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth to his doorstep asking for help.

In a detective fiction setup worthy of Chandler, Shasta -- a minor actress and mistress of real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann -- tells Doc that her lover's wife, who has a lover of her own, is trying to ship Mickey off to an insane asylum so she can take control of his fortune. Doc takes the case, but before his investigation can get off the ground, he's accused of murder, picked up and released by the cops and the FBI and discovers that both Shasta and Mickey have gone missing. No client, no money, but a mystery to solve.

Weirdness and obsession

Doc does true detective work -- dressing up in disguises, following leads -- yet he's stoned most of the time and easily distracted. His world is full of Pynchonian weirdness: an ex-junkie sax player who has faked his own death and is living, unrecognized, with his band in Topanga Canyon; a surfer who ventures out too far to catch impossible waves; a lawyer fixated on the minutiae of "Gilligan's Island" and other trash TV; and Mickey's collection of pornographic ties, decorated with images of his lovers -- although Shasta is conspicuously missing.

Nearly every character has an obsession or addiction. Doc's almost constantly altered state allows the unreal to shimmer against reality like light on an ocean. Sentences appear and Doc wonders if he's said them aloud; he never finds out, and we can't be sure. A clue discovered on an acid trip is as valuable as anything learned while straight. And his cannabis-induced paranoia is only a quarter turn from his detective work -- especially when he comes across references to the mysterious Golden Fang. Doc knows the Golden Fang is a boat with a mysterious, historic past. But it also seems to be a consortium of horny Silver Lake dentists, not to mention an Asian gang connected to drugs and money, Vietnam and China.

In classic Pynchon fashion, random incidents add up to conspiracy -- maybe. Behind powerful figures loom shadowy, more powerful figures, and complex layers of knowledge lead to confusion as much as clarity. There is also a lot of sex (if little romance), many pop-culture allusions (one scene references at least two classic noir films), characters who cross over from Pynchon's other work ("Vineland," predominantly) and silly names galore.

It's easy to forget, among all his games and puzzles, that Pynchon can write razor-sharp beauty with the best of them. A page-long description of the Santa Anas demands a place next to classic passages by Chandler and Joan Didion.

In Pynchon's big books, these devastating descriptions, particularly of place, are often swept away in the tide of prose and characters. Here, in a novel that focuses on Los Angeles so sharply that Tommy's is pinpointed by its cross streets, they shine.

L.A. on his mind

Pynchon, now 72, apparently lived in Southern California in the 1960s, and the attention to L.A.'s geography implies that the region has remained on his mind. Maybe he's got a clear sense of recall -- or maybe he comes back to visit or has devoted time to exploring Google Maps' street views. Either way, his details of the city are precise.

The Internet does make an appearance in "Inherent Vice," with a reference to the pre-Web ARPAnet and a prescient sense of future connection. "Someday," a real estate agent says, "there will be computers for all this, all you'll have to do's type in what you're looking for . . . and it'll be right back at you with more information than you'd ever want to know, any lot in the L.A. Basin all the way back to the Spanish land grants -- water rights, encumbrances, mortgage histories, whatever you want." The idea reads as both hope and lament.

And yet, if "Inherent Vice" exhibits nostalgia, it is not for the Los Angeles of yesteryear but for the days when genuine mystery was possible, when Doc's acid trip could be as relevant as Det. Bjornsen's world, when complex layers could both contradict and coexist. It's a love letter to a time when obsessives couldn't get all the answers from computers, when we might embrace the unknowable.

Still, after getting pretty far out, "Inherent Vice" eventually circles back and ties up all its loose ends. It has a climactic moment, a cushiony denouement -- by gum, closure. If this stands in counterpoint to Pynchon's most acclaimed work, perhaps we should pay heed to the novel's title: "Inherent Vice" refers to a hidden defect that undermines a property's worth, a marine-legal term for a Shakespearean flaw. It could refer to Los Angeles; it could refer to the 1960s. Or it could refer to the author's work itself: With Pynchon's brilliance comes readability.

Kellogg is the lead blogger for Jacket Copy, The Times' book blog.

Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1841102,00.html

Sunday, Sep. 14, 2008
Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008
By Joel Stein

A few weeks ago, I reread the beginning of Infinite Jest, and stupidly cursed right out loud its author, David Foster Wallace, out of jealousy, because I will never write — or even think — like he does in just the first few pages of what is the best novel written since I've been old enough to read. It's a circular 1,079-page book about the impossibility of communication that is so wondrously complex that when I got to meet with its editor, Michael Pietsch, and ask him a basic question about the plot, he couldn't even tell me.

Wallace committed suicide on Friday night, at the age of 46. He might be remembered as the guy who brought footnotes back (his fiction is full of them), or the person who magnified Thomas Pynchon's reader-reaction paranoia into post-modern mega-epic. He did do those things. But Wallace was also the greatest horror novelist ever. In Infinite Jest a corporation-run unified North America of the near-future (dates have been replaced by sponsor names, such as the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) is being decimated by a videotape so entertaining that people watch it on a loop, mesmerized until they die of dehydration or starvation or lack of sleep. Reading it, you realize how soul-sad lonely you are. And Wallace creates that effect, like Pynchon, while being laugh-out-loud funny.

His was not a cheery worldview, but it was honest. He ate meat but realized, in his essay "Consider the Lobster," that if a crustacean is trying to claw its way out of a pot of boiling water, you are cold-blooded murderer when you eat it. In the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic last year, he nihilistically stated an unpopular truth about liberty: The cost of freedom is that you have to occasionally let 3,000 people die in terrorist attacks. His 1999 collection of short stories, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men — which John Krasinki has adapted into a movie to be released later this year — damns his gender as a greedy, cold, oversexed marauders.

Wallace, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1997, was a tennis prodigy and a math whiz (his Amherst philosophy major focused on modal logic, whatever that is). His thoughts sprawled beyond the boundaries that most writers observe into notes and equations, one sentence going on for so many pages even Faulkner would have demanded a period. He seemed curious about everything: he wrote nonfiction articles about food and porn conventions and Dennis Hastert and women's tennis. His Essay for the New York Times' Play Magazine celebrating "Federer as Religious Experience" is a classic of sports writing.

At the book party for Infinite Jest, I sat, for a moment, next to him. He wasn't talking to anyone and seemed pretty uncomfortable for a guy who was having a party thrown for him. Years later, I reviewed his collection of short stories Oblivion, and foolishly, jealously wrote this: "David Foster Wallace writes so beautifully, is so show-offishly smart and understands the intricacies of human emotion so keenly that a reasonable person can only hope he is terribly unhappy. Which, if this collection of short stories is any indication, he is." For a far better, less embittered, summation of this loss, read the soliloquy from Hamlet that gave Wallace's great novel its title. It is Hamlet's meditation on mortality, now tragically appropriate, that begins: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred my imagination is!"