For readers whose wrists are still aching from nursing Thomas Pynchon’s previous novel, the gargantuan Against the Day, Inherent Vice – his latest bulletin from his own alternative version of America – may have arrived with unseemly haste. Yet at a mere 369 pages, this new work is not only lighter in terms of its bulk, but, at first glance, also in tone.
Inherent Vice is set in California in the late 1960s, when Ronald Reagan’s implausible political career had already reached the heights of state governor. Its main character is Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a private detective whose lack of cases leaves him plenty of time for getting high. However, when his ex-girlfriend Shasta hires him to look for her missing lover, Doc, in the manner of all the best private eyes, soon finds himself in the middle of a world of pornography, crooked real estate, and dodgy cops where people go missing and come back from the dead. This being Pynchon, there’s also a lot of stoner comedy, a surfer rock band with some awful lyrics, and a lot of TV watching, including a bizarre episode where Doc tells his friend that an enormous block of heroin is a television, and they spend the night watching it.
Of all Pynchon’s previous novels, Inherent Vice feels closest to The Crying of Lot 49. The typical array of subplots intrude, but Doc, like Oedipa Maas, is always present to hold it together – he, like the reader, may not always be sure what’s going on, but there is little need to make connections between different time periods, continents or alternative realities. The result is a book which is enjoyable in a way that makes me want to recommend it to readers who’d run a mile from Gravity’s Rainbow or V.
Pynchon’s great triumph here though is that beneath this approachable novel, he’s smuggled in a reflection on America as dark as the blackest film noir. Inherent vice is an insurance term that relates to the hidden defects of objects that contribute to their deterioration, and here the inherent vice seems to be America’s. Frequent references to the Manson Family signal the end of the hippy era of peace, love and understanding, but the combination of untramelled greed and mindless consumerism that is set to take its place will, we know, mark the end of the sixties innocence, and lead us to the crisis of today. It’s a novel that is fascinated by doubles and dubious identity, and the struggle to map a way through reality when a combination of drugs, advertising and government paranoia means nobody’s quite sure what that is any more.