Reviewed by Ted Gioia
I must have run into this Pynchon fellow back when he
was working on Gravity’s Rainbow. The reclusive author
was living in Manhattan Beach and haunting the
coastline of the South Bay of Los Angeles. During the
same period Manhattan Beach and nearby Hermosa
Beach were my teenage homes away from home, and the
places where I hung out—Either/Or Bookstore, the
Lighthouse, Zeppies Pizza, Taco
Bill’s—were just the sort of store-
fronts to attract the custom of a
counterculture sort like Mr.
Pynchon.
I have long wondered which of those
beach bums was the eccentric post-
modern novelist. Was he there
watching the great Buzz Swartz and
Matt Gage dominate the strand
volleyball scene? Hell, maybe he
is Matt Gage—they look enough alike. Or was he seated next
to me at the Lighthouse, checking out Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s
sax heroics? Or should I believe my friend’s insistence that
the erudite gentlemen who dominated the conversation at a
book discussion group at the local beach library was in fact
the author of Vineland and V?
Now after reading Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s late-vintage
detective-as-stoner novel, I am all the more convinced that
this author was shadowing me all that time. The story is set in
Gordita Beach (a stand-in for Manhattan Beach) in April and
May of 1970, and is immersed in the surfadelic culture of the
period. Yes, the Lighthouse appears here, as do dozens of
other places where I might have crossed paths with the
secretive Mr. P.
This is more than a novel about the beach; it is also—
uncharacteristically for this often challenging author—a book
you could bring to the beach for an entertaining read amidst
the sand and sun. The plot moves with great speed; by page
25, the reader has already enjoyed a dose of sex, murder,
drugs and rock-and-roll. But there is plenty more of all of
these to come. Before Inherent Vice comes to its wipeout of a
conclusion, you will have encountered enough narcotics to
keep a Columbian cartel busy for a year, and so many corpses
that Thomas Nogouchi needs to call a temp agency for
backup support.
Doc Sportello is the hippie private investigator at the center
of these strange happenings. Doc’s track record is spotty at
best. He probably commits more crimes than he solves. His
memory and mental skills might once have been first-rate, but
that was about ten thousand reefers ago. Nowadays he is
lucky if he doesn’t have a hallucinatory flashback at the worst
possible moment. Even when he delivers the goods, he rarely
gets paid. In short, he is more attuned to the karmic valence
than the criminal elements surrounding him.
Yet people come to Doc rather than go to the police. This
gives him access to loads of secret info. He knows about a
strange smuggling outfit called the Golden Fang, a surf sax
player who died from an overdose then came back to life, a
real estate developer with strange plans for personal
redemption, a loan shark who can get away with murder, and
a host of other conspiracies, shake-downs, put-ons, and mix-
ups. All these plot elements somehow fit together—if just
barely. By the time you get the finish line of Inherent Vice you
have SoCal conspiracy so broad-based it makes Chinatown
look like a Paris-Hilton-overnight-in-the-slammer offense.
Fans of Pynchon know how meticulously he researches his
period writings. Scholars have demonstrated that Pynchon
immersed himself in the London newspapers of the WWII-
era while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, tossing out enough
throwaway clues hither and thither to keep a whole
generation of tweed-coated academics busy. Inherent Vice
reveals a similar degree of deep research. The news events of
the Spring of 1970—the impending Charles Manson trial, the
Lakers-Knicks series, various Nixon and Kissinger theatrics—
simmer away in the background here, along with a plethora of
geographical and cultural minutiae. Seymour hosts the
Halloween show at the Wiltern, hit songs reach rad decibels
on KHJ, Cal Worthington shows off his “dog” Spot, shoppers
flock to Zody’s and Zeidler & Zeidler . . . readers from
colder climes will come up short trying to place many of
these names. But Pynchon knows the smog-infested lanes
through which he is navigating.
An occasional anachronism will slip through. Okay, I will cut
Pynchon some slack, and assume that there might have been
a doper with an Internet connection back in 1970—our author
at least knows that ARPA-Net is the proper terminology
given the period. But I hate to tell Tom that Kareem Abdul-
Jabbar was still going under the name of Lew Alcindor back
then. And I simply refuse to believe that any SoCal surfer
knew about the big waves at Mavericks in Half Moon Bay
during the Nixon administration. Yet these are small gripes in
a book that gets so much right.
The dialogue is crisp and clever—almost ready for a Quentin
Tarantino film. The prose avoids the degree of self-
indulgence that I associate with this author, and at times
approaches the one adjective I never thought I would apply
to Pynchon: tight. The novelist retains many of his time-
honored trademarks: a preference for lots and lots of
characters (I recommend you keep a scorecard)—albeit
handled more deftly here than elsewhere in his oeuvre; a
certain conceptual extravagance that pushes everything two
or three steps beyond anything taught at the Iowa Writers
Workshop; and, above all, the paranoid tone, of which
Pynchon is perhaps our greatest connoisseur. Other
novelists have written about the Mob, but only Pynchon
looks for The Mob behind the Mob.
The small details are half the fun here. For no extra charge,
the reader is given a new interpretation of the Japanese movie
Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964) which explicates it as
a reworking of Roman Holiday (1953)—full disclosure: I still
can't decide whether Ghidrah is supposed to be Audrey
Hepburn or Gregory Peck. We find Henry Kissinger on the
Today show, formulating foreign policy: "Vell, den, ve
schould chust bombp dem, schouldn't ve?" We learn about
a Beverly Hills auto collision repair shop called The
Resurrection of the Body. And we find a health food joint
off Melrose called The Price of Wisdom, which is located
upstairs from Ruby's Lounge—but you will need to check out
Job 28:18 to figure that one out.
What other writer would give you counterfeit money with
Richard Nixon’s picture on all denominations? an immense
stash of heroin that doubles as a new type of TV set? a class
action suit representing viewers of the movie The Wizard of
Oz? a lost continent at the bottom of the ocean whose exiles
simply moved to Los Angeles? or an encounter between
Godzilla and the folks on Gilligan's Island? Every page has
something strange and wonderful—although sometimes just
plain strange. I’m not sure what drugs you need to take to
come up with this stuff. Certainly I’ll pass on the pills, thank
you very much. But I read the book, and with pleasure.
Here is a taste:
Offshore winds had been to strong to be doing the surf much good, but
surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn
weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in
everybody’s skin of desert winds and heat and restlessness, with the
exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave
sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum,
everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state
liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming
unstuck, is how dry the air was. . . . In the little apartment complexes
the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps
and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together
with a liquid sound, so that from inside,
in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the
wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the
rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and
look outside, and of course there'd be only the same hot cloudless depth
of day, no rain in sight.
Pynchon has found his perfect element: namely water with a
tiny fringe of sand. He has done war-torn London and
California wine country and other settings in the past. But his
worldview and writing style have always possessed something
of the surfer’s freeform daring about them, and a fluid sense
of structure that is almost an anti-structure. All of these traits
contribute to the success of Inherent Vice.
We also encounter some of this author's characteristic
blindspots here—you shouldn't read Pynchon expecting
psychological depth, plausible situations, or a coherent
interpretation of modern life. In this regard, Inherent Vice is in
keeping with his previous books. But, dang, this novel is
readable in a way that Pynchon has rarely been before. I have
come to expect the unexpected from this author, but this time
he really surprised me—in the eternal battle between form
and content, he has shown the smallest glimmer of a formalist
streak.
And you, dear reader? If you have been scared off of this
writer because of his daunting reputation, this is the time to
put your toe—or your whole boogie board—in the water. I
have read lots of novels in my time, but this was the first one
I finished by exclaiming: “Tubular!”
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Birth (and Death) of the
Cool.
I must have run into this Pynchon fellow back when he
was working on Gravity’s Rainbow. The reclusive author
was living in Manhattan Beach and haunting the
coastline of the South Bay of Los Angeles. During the
same period Manhattan Beach and nearby Hermosa
Beach were my teenage homes away from home, and the
places where I hung out—Either/Or Bookstore, the
Lighthouse, Zeppies Pizza, Taco
Bill’s—were just the sort of store-
fronts to attract the custom of a
counterculture sort like Mr.
Pynchon.
I have long wondered which of those
beach bums was the eccentric post-
modern novelist. Was he there
watching the great Buzz Swartz and
Matt Gage dominate the strand
volleyball scene? Hell, maybe he
is Matt Gage—they look enough alike. Or was he seated next
to me at the Lighthouse, checking out Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s
sax heroics? Or should I believe my friend’s insistence that
the erudite gentlemen who dominated the conversation at a
book discussion group at the local beach library was in fact
the author of Vineland and V?
Now after reading Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s late-vintage
detective-as-stoner novel, I am all the more convinced that
this author was shadowing me all that time. The story is set in
Gordita Beach (a stand-in for Manhattan Beach) in April and
May of 1970, and is immersed in the surfadelic culture of the
period. Yes, the Lighthouse appears here, as do dozens of
other places where I might have crossed paths with the
secretive Mr. P.
This is more than a novel about the beach; it is also—
uncharacteristically for this often challenging author—a book
you could bring to the beach for an entertaining read amidst
the sand and sun. The plot moves with great speed; by page
25, the reader has already enjoyed a dose of sex, murder,
drugs and rock-and-roll. But there is plenty more of all of
these to come. Before Inherent Vice comes to its wipeout of a
conclusion, you will have encountered enough narcotics to
keep a Columbian cartel busy for a year, and so many corpses
that Thomas Nogouchi needs to call a temp agency for
backup support.
Doc Sportello is the hippie private investigator at the center
of these strange happenings. Doc’s track record is spotty at
best. He probably commits more crimes than he solves. His
memory and mental skills might once have been first-rate, but
that was about ten thousand reefers ago. Nowadays he is
lucky if he doesn’t have a hallucinatory flashback at the worst
possible moment. Even when he delivers the goods, he rarely
gets paid. In short, he is more attuned to the karmic valence
than the criminal elements surrounding him.
Yet people come to Doc rather than go to the police. This
gives him access to loads of secret info. He knows about a
strange smuggling outfit called the Golden Fang, a surf sax
player who died from an overdose then came back to life, a
real estate developer with strange plans for personal
redemption, a loan shark who can get away with murder, and
a host of other conspiracies, shake-downs, put-ons, and mix-
ups. All these plot elements somehow fit together—if just
barely. By the time you get the finish line of Inherent Vice you
have SoCal conspiracy so broad-based it makes Chinatown
look like a Paris-Hilton-overnight-in-the-slammer offense.
Fans of Pynchon know how meticulously he researches his
period writings. Scholars have demonstrated that Pynchon
immersed himself in the London newspapers of the WWII-
era while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, tossing out enough
throwaway clues hither and thither to keep a whole
generation of tweed-coated academics busy. Inherent Vice
reveals a similar degree of deep research. The news events of
the Spring of 1970—the impending Charles Manson trial, the
Lakers-Knicks series, various Nixon and Kissinger theatrics—
simmer away in the background here, along with a plethora of
geographical and cultural minutiae. Seymour hosts the
Halloween show at the Wiltern, hit songs reach rad decibels
on KHJ, Cal Worthington shows off his “dog” Spot, shoppers
flock to Zody’s and Zeidler & Zeidler . . . readers from
colder climes will come up short trying to place many of
these names. But Pynchon knows the smog-infested lanes
through which he is navigating.
An occasional anachronism will slip through. Okay, I will cut
Pynchon some slack, and assume that there might have been
a doper with an Internet connection back in 1970—our author
at least knows that ARPA-Net is the proper terminology
given the period. But I hate to tell Tom that Kareem Abdul-
Jabbar was still going under the name of Lew Alcindor back
then. And I simply refuse to believe that any SoCal surfer
knew about the big waves at Mavericks in Half Moon Bay
during the Nixon administration. Yet these are small gripes in
a book that gets so much right.
The dialogue is crisp and clever—almost ready for a Quentin
Tarantino film. The prose avoids the degree of self-
indulgence that I associate with this author, and at times
approaches the one adjective I never thought I would apply
to Pynchon: tight. The novelist retains many of his time-
honored trademarks: a preference for lots and lots of
characters (I recommend you keep a scorecard)—albeit
handled more deftly here than elsewhere in his oeuvre; a
certain conceptual extravagance that pushes everything two
or three steps beyond anything taught at the Iowa Writers
Workshop; and, above all, the paranoid tone, of which
Pynchon is perhaps our greatest connoisseur. Other
novelists have written about the Mob, but only Pynchon
looks for The Mob behind the Mob.
The small details are half the fun here. For no extra charge,
the reader is given a new interpretation of the Japanese movie
Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964) which explicates it as
a reworking of Roman Holiday (1953)—full disclosure: I still
can't decide whether Ghidrah is supposed to be Audrey
Hepburn or Gregory Peck. We find Henry Kissinger on the
Today show, formulating foreign policy: "Vell, den, ve
schould chust bombp dem, schouldn't ve?" We learn about
a Beverly Hills auto collision repair shop called The
Resurrection of the Body. And we find a health food joint
off Melrose called The Price of Wisdom, which is located
upstairs from Ruby's Lounge—but you will need to check out
Job 28:18 to figure that one out.
What other writer would give you counterfeit money with
Richard Nixon’s picture on all denominations? an immense
stash of heroin that doubles as a new type of TV set? a class
action suit representing viewers of the movie The Wizard of
Oz? a lost continent at the bottom of the ocean whose exiles
simply moved to Los Angeles? or an encounter between
Godzilla and the folks on Gilligan's Island? Every page has
something strange and wonderful—although sometimes just
plain strange. I’m not sure what drugs you need to take to
come up with this stuff. Certainly I’ll pass on the pills, thank
you very much. But I read the book, and with pleasure.
Here is a taste:
Offshore winds had been to strong to be doing the surf much good, but
surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn
weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in
everybody’s skin of desert winds and heat and restlessness, with the
exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave
sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum,
everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state
liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming
unstuck, is how dry the air was. . . . In the little apartment complexes
the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps
and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together
with a liquid sound, so that from inside,
in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the
wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the
rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and
look outside, and of course there'd be only the same hot cloudless depth
of day, no rain in sight.
Pynchon has found his perfect element: namely water with a
tiny fringe of sand. He has done war-torn London and
California wine country and other settings in the past. But his
worldview and writing style have always possessed something
of the surfer’s freeform daring about them, and a fluid sense
of structure that is almost an anti-structure. All of these traits
contribute to the success of Inherent Vice.
We also encounter some of this author's characteristic
blindspots here—you shouldn't read Pynchon expecting
psychological depth, plausible situations, or a coherent
interpretation of modern life. In this regard, Inherent Vice is in
keeping with his previous books. But, dang, this novel is
readable in a way that Pynchon has rarely been before. I have
come to expect the unexpected from this author, but this time
he really surprised me—in the eternal battle between form
and content, he has shown the smallest glimmer of a formalist
streak.
And you, dear reader? If you have been scared off of this
writer because of his daunting reputation, this is the time to
put your toe—or your whole boogie board—in the water. I
have read lots of novels in my time, but this was the first one
I finished by exclaiming: “Tubular!”
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Birth (and Death) of the
Cool.
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Conceptual Fiction
Celebrating masterworks of science
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magical realism
Great Books Guide
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literature
| Click on image to purchase |
| Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon |
He's been in hiding so long, we’ve forgotten
what the original charges were. The photo
on the wanted poster
down at the post office
is so old, stamps were
only four cents back
when it was taken—not
that Pynchon would
know, since he was al-
legedly connected to an
underground alternative
mail system, the dreaded
Tristero, in which a quick sketch of Miles
Davis’s trumpet replaced your usual
postage. How cool is that? When bounty
hunters are in pursuit, he has been known to
leap out of second story windows to avoid
capture or requests for a quick snapshot.
For a while, some speculated the Pynchon
was actually J.D. Salinger, the Unabomber,
D.B. Cooper, or maybe all three. Who
knows? He has lived a life so reclusive that
Emily Dickinson looks like a party animal
by comparison, and when Dick Cheney
went into hiding at an “undisclosed location”
following the 9/11 attacks, his hideout was,
according to some insiders, the spare
bedroom at Tom’s apartment. Some of us
hope that Pynchon will receive the Nobel
Prize in literature, if only in anticipation that
it will lure him into the open, where he can
be arrested by His Majesty the King of
Sweden and extradited back to the States to
face charges. But given this sly fugitive’s
gamesmanship, we probably won’t get
anything better than a handcuffed Professor
Irwin Corey, who impersonated the author
at the National Book Award ceremony in
1974. In the meantime, you can search the
books for clues, of which you will find no
shortage.
what the original charges were. The photo
on the wanted poster
down at the post office
is so old, stamps were
only four cents back
when it was taken—not
that Pynchon would
know, since he was al-
legedly connected to an
underground alternative
mail system, the dreaded
Tristero, in which a quick sketch of Miles
Davis’s trumpet replaced your usual
postage. How cool is that? When bounty
hunters are in pursuit, he has been known to
leap out of second story windows to avoid
capture or requests for a quick snapshot.
For a while, some speculated the Pynchon
was actually J.D. Salinger, the Unabomber,
D.B. Cooper, or maybe all three. Who
knows? He has lived a life so reclusive that
Emily Dickinson looks like a party animal
by comparison, and when Dick Cheney
went into hiding at an “undisclosed location”
following the 9/11 attacks, his hideout was,
according to some insiders, the spare
bedroom at Tom’s apartment. Some of us
hope that Pynchon will receive the Nobel
Prize in literature, if only in anticipation that
it will lure him into the open, where he can
be arrested by His Majesty the King of
Sweden and extradited back to the States to
face charges. But given this sly fugitive’s
gamesmanship, we probably won’t get
anything better than a handcuffed Professor
Irwin Corey, who impersonated the author
at the National Book Award ceremony in
1974. In the meantime, you can search the
books for clues, of which you will find no
shortage.
| ROGUES GALLERY: THOMAS PYNCHON |
| New Angles on an Old Genre |
| Postmodern Mystery |
| Postmodern Mystery is a web site devoted to experimental, unconventional and postmodern approaches to stories of mystery and suspense |
| Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia |
Further Clues:
Dr. Irwin Corey's Acceptance Speech on Behalf of
Thomas Pynchon at the 1974 National Book Award
Ceremony
Thomas Pynchon Home Page at San Narciso Community
College
Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons and here (note the
author's pronunciation of his name as pinch-AWN
instead of the frequently heard PINCH-un)
Review of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles
Recommended Sites:
Conceptual Fiction
Great Books Guide
The New Canon
Ted Gioia's homepage
Ted Gioia (on Twitter)
American Fiction Notes
The Art of Reading
The Big Read
Blographia Literaria
Books, Inq.
Bookslut
Booksquare
A Commonplace Blog
Conversational Reading
Crimespree Magazine
Critical Mass
Dana Gioia
The Elegant Variation
Fictionaut
In Search of the Classic Mystery
Joseph Peschel
Light Reading
The Literary Saloon
Los Angeles Review of Books
Maud Newton
The Millions
The Misread City
Nota Bene Books
Open Letters Monthly
Readerville
The Reading Experience
Reviews and Responses
Tipping My Fedora
Waggish
Conceptual Fiction
Great Books Guide
The New Canon
Ted Gioia's homepage
Ted Gioia (on Twitter)
American Fiction Notes
The Art of Reading
The Big Read
Blographia Literaria
Books, Inq.
Bookslut
Booksquare
A Commonplace Blog
Conversational Reading
Crimespree Magazine
Critical Mass
Dana Gioia
The Elegant Variation
Fictionaut
In Search of the Classic Mystery
Joseph Peschel
Light Reading
The Literary Saloon
Los Angeles Review of Books
Maud Newton
The Millions
The Misread City
Nota Bene Books
Open Letters Monthly
Readerville
The Reading Experience
Reviews and Responses
Tipping My Fedora
Waggish