INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, a psychedelic noir set in 1970
Los Angeles, is a nostalgic trip. The protagonist is a flashback not to
Chandler's Marlowe but Altman's, a stoner gumsandal named "Doc"
Sportello who tokes his way through an adventure filled with bell-bottoms and
Nehru jackets, love beads and cowrie shells. The groovy chicks, and there are
plenty, wear micro minidresses and the heavy straights have a hate on for
jive-ass hippie freaks. You dig?
Inherent Vice is also nostalgic in that it takes us back to
earlier Pynchon: a tangled intersection of politics, technology, and paranoia, a
landscape of secret societies (here it's the Golden Fang or Chryskylodon) and
submerged continents. And, of course, lots of sinister slapstick involving
perversely unmusical song lyrics and a bewildering cast of characters
with silly names like Sauncho Smilax, Bigfoot Bjornsen, Japonica Fenway, Special
FBI Agents Flatweed and Borderline, and sexy stewardii Motella and Lourdes.
The suggestion is occasionally made that Doc's history of
substance abuse gives him greater, extrasensory powers of perception, an ability
to detect "vibes" and the hidden connections between things. This
serves him in good stead as the plot - which involves drugs, money-laundering,
and numerous missing persons, just for starters - is complex to the point of
being incomprehensible. One has the sense that Pynchon, who has a habit of this,
simply comes up with new twists whenever the narrative seems in danger of
slowing down. Some attempt is made at sorting it all out in the end, though
there are any number of loose threads. None of which are important anyway.
What is important is the elegaic tone. It is no accident
that the main motif Pynchon uses to hitch his fantasy to the real world of
history is the Manson case. Over twenty references to Manson, his
"family," and their upcoming trial, are scattered throughout the text.
This is important because Manson marked a cultural watershed. In the words of
shock-shlock director John Waters, it was Manson who "finally ended the
hippie movement." Or, as Vincent Bugliosi, Manson's prosecutor, later put
it, the Manson murders "sounded the death knell for hippies and all they
symbolically represented."
It is a historical moment Doc, most profoundly in the dim
afterglow of a joint and cable TV, can prophetically sense. The corporate suits
are taking over, Las Vegas is on the verge of being de-Mobbed and Disneyfied,
the Summer of Love has turned into an Endless Bummer, "and here was Doc, on
the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how
the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after
all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might
reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from
a doper and stubbing it out for good."
At another point, among "gatherings of carefree youth and
happy dopers" Doc notices "older men, there and not there, rigid,
unsmiling." These, we can be sure, are the real forces of evil, not the
blonde yakuza gangster, the lecherous dentist Dr. Blatnoyd, or the sadistic hit
man Adrian Prussia. These rigid, unsmiling men are the bill collectors, the
businessmen, the office managers of the new dispensation, and "If
everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the
faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt
entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful
and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen." Flower power is
the god that failed and the straights stand ready to inherit the earth.
There is something of Austen Powers vs. Doctor Evil in all of
this, and given the campy, cartoonish nature of much of the novel, which most
nearly resembles 1967's Crying of Lot 49 among Pynchon's other work, the
comparison is not unjust. Indeed, it's a bit of a relief. All of Pynchon's
novels since Lot 49 (and yes, I'm including Gravity's Rainbow)
have suffered terribly from bloat, a more-is-more grandiosity and runaway page
inflation. Inherent Vice is shorter (thank heavens) but still comes in
overweight. The wise-guy patter, so essential to successful noir, is lame and
there are stretches where the writing clunks around like Doc's Dodge Dart.
Surely among major contemporary authors Pynchon is one of the least graceful
stylists, and he does nothing to redeem that reputation here.
Still, he is a major contemporary author for a reason.
Over forty years ago he sounded notes of dire foreboding about where the culture
was heading. Going back in time he essentially tells the same story, but now
from the perspective of someone who wants to reconsider how it all went wrong.
Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star August 2, 2009.
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