His writing has been called dense, labyrinthine and immense. Even the unofficial Web site devoted to his work acknowledges some truth in accusations like “you’ll need a dictionary and an encyclopedia to understand all the scientific metaphors, historical references and obscure words.”
He is Thomas Pynchon. Hailed early in his career as one of the great fiction writers of the Twentieth Century. Compared with Nabokov, Swift and Joyce for his satirical convoluted alternate realities, Pynchon has achieved great critical and reasonable commercial success blazing his own trail with intricately woven narratives for almost fifty years.
But you won’t see Pynchon on Oprah’s Book Club, any Chicken Soup collection, or even most university reading lists for English and Literature programs. His plotlines are complicated, rife with obscure scientific and historical details, and often lead several hundred pages to no discernible conclusion. On the other hand, his fans are avid, enthusiastic flag wavers who cry out his insightful skill digging into the nether regions of the human psyche, global conspiracies and misunderstood genius into the fish-eyed stares of naysayer critics.
Full disclosure. I am one such fan. But I’ve kept my flag at half-staff for more than a decade as I gave up recommending Pynchon’s books to friends and associates after Mason and Dixon proved too complicated for almost any of said friends or associates to enjoy as a pleasurable read, or even finish before putting the thick hardbound tome I had given them out to pasture on nightstands and end tables across the West Coast. As with many of life’s lessons gleaned from books, it was from Pynchon I learned to quietly appreciate my own personal passions for their own sakes. Getting yourself into the erratic swing of his style is not recreational reading for many.
This time I’m making an exception.
Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s most recent fiction novel, follows one protagonist along a narrative that is temporally and geographically streamlined. No zeppelins, no talking dogs. Not even ultrasonic animatronic ducks or a single mention of Tesla.
Inherent Vice is a true-blue detective story with an apparent burnout gumshoe, with just a hint of deeper humanity. A real person. Who likes drugs, music and sex… not a caricature of the sixties, man.
Doc Sportello, a private detective with a penchant for marijuana with an occasional dash of harder hallucinogens, takes on job after job for ex-girlfriends, local riff-raff and the odd convicted felon more for curiosity and kindness than the eventuality someone somehow will pay him for services. Sportello lives in Los Angeles of the late Sixties, and more importantly embodies much of spirit of a generation who defied the traditional roles of youth just as the age was winding down and disenchantment with the dream of the preceding decade was blurring the stars in the eyes with the smog and smut of the world they lived in.
Deep into the book, and especially its conclusion, Pynchon uses 20/20 hindsight to stare into the future from the cusp of a cultural sea change as it was happening. Almost offering an explanation of how we got where we are today, without the didactic overtones many who lived through and speak of that time.
And if that sounds too cerebral, Inherent Vice also offers a taste of the manic, frenetic reality Pynchon can craft like no other: Biker gangs, guns, drugs, government conspiracy, dirty cops and drug dealers, gang wars, frivolous sex, and resurgent underwater cities.
If history is doomed to repeat itself, Inherent Vice may yet prove a survival guide to the next explosion of peace, love and overarching idealism in the modern era.
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