Inherent Vice [Paperback]

"Inherent Vice" (apparently a term from Maritime Law) is rather uncharacteristic of Thomas Pynchon in many ways. At 370 pages it is short by his standards, and it is entirely lacking in the density and obtuseness of much of his work. It does not have anything like the scope of, say, "Gravity's Rainbow," nor the stylistic difficulties of, especially, "Mason and Dixon," rather it is a crime novel somewhat in the mould of Elmore Leonard, set in 1969 Los Angeles, just after the Manson murders, which are referred to continually.

The main character is Doc Sportello, a private investigator and habitual imbiber of hashish and other narcotics. He is approximately 29 years old, and espouses hippy ideals while maintaining a healthy distrust for The Man, especially as represented by the LAPD. His favourite words are "Groovy" and "Bummer," depending on the situation. His is an easygoing and well-meaning individual, if somewhat priapic. The plot is set in motion when Doc's ex-girlfriend, for whom he still has feelings- lust, mainly- shows up with an assignment for him, concerning her rich, property-developer new boyfriend, who she believes is under threat. Said boyfriend goes missing, and some other cases turn up which may be related. It's too complicated to go into, but all roads lead Doc to a shadowy entity called Golden Fang, the nature of which promises to hold the key to the mystery.

Unlike most Pynchon novels almost all the mysteries of the plot are eventually explained, and the plot is a fairly standard one for the genre. The tone is relaxed, playfully humorous, and Pynchon's fondness for dubious puns, that somehow seem funny in the context of the book, is much in evidence. It's not a masterpiece, by any means, but it's not supposed to be. It can't really be compared to "Gravity's Rainbow" or the like. Of Pynchon's previous work, its nearest relation would be "Vineland." It's not particularly substantial, but I found "Inherent Vice" a good, quick read, funny and likable, and definitely its author's most accessible work.

Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive king of American postmodern fiction, likes to keep us waiting: between 1974 and 1990 he published no novels at all. But in the last few years we've been a bit luckier, and given that in late 2006 we got the massive "Against the Day", it's amazing that this summer there's already another Pynchon novel on sale.

"Inherent Vice" is wonderful news for Pynchon fans, but arguably will also bring him a new audience too. All will hopefully be charmed by its Big Lebowski-flavoured story of a private investigator, Doc, operating in LA just as the sixties decade has finished. The plot concerns the various cases Doc takes on (all missing persons of various kinds) and requires concentration to follow, partly because of a multitude of characters ranging from Doc's ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth, to paranoid marine law specialist Sauncho Smilax, to hippy-hating LAPD cop, 'Bigfoot' Bjornsen (addicted to eating frozen chocolate-covered bananas which he keeps in a morgue fridge).

There is the same sense of clever playfulness you always get with Pynchon, though to begin with, you might get lulled into imagining this is simply his fun take on the hard-boiled detective novel of Raymond Chandler & co. But actually this book is probably something more subtle; like his earlier book 'Vineland', which gave such a rich picture of life in Northern California in the eighties, with its paranoia and strange atmospheres, "'Inherent Vice' gets to pose the bigger question about the sixties, which is, where did it get us? And do we all, like Doc, end up 'working for criminals', even when we try not to?

Enjoyable, perplexing, kept making me burst out laughing; a great, intelligent summer book.

If anybody tries to tell you that Inherent Vice is "Pynchon-lite" or a good "way in" to his unforgivably dense and complex early books, don't believe them. It's not that Inherent Vice isn't light-hearted or readable or particularly insouciant, it's just that: it's not really Pynchon. I can't recommend it as any kind of gateway novel to the harder stuff of Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon (or whatever), simply because it carries none of the postmodernist leanings, esoteric vocabulary or anti-structural abandon that so pervades those earlier works. I can, however, recommend Inherent Vice as one of the better examples of the hardboiled revivalism that's currently so modish and en vogue. Usual comparative touchstones for reviewers of Pynchon are the higher echelons of the modernist cannon - you know, all those extremely long and opaque novels rampant with metaphysical concerns (Joyce, Kafka, Forster, Wyndham Lewis et al and etc.) - but the genre brothers of Inherent Vice are strikingly more low-brow, even pulpy (a term I use without prejudice): Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard. The significant point of difference being that Pynchon re-appropriates the stylistic and aesthetic mores of noir fiction that saw their hay day in the late twenties/early thirties and sets his novel instead in 1969. All of the narrative hallmarks of the hardboiled remain intact; the cold and apathetic portrayal of hard violence, the playing-it-fast-and-loose-with-the-law/whatever-it-takes approach to solving `the case' and the iniquitous relationship between the police and certain individuals: but here they're augmented by contemporary 1960/70s issues: recreational drug use, a free and easy approach to sex, bad haircuts and, er, surf rock.

Inherent Vice entails a characteristic hardboiled plot that's so convoluted and tricksy as to make the act of précis fundamentally reductive and unhelpful. Furthermore, and requisite of the book's enormous cast, I had to maintain a system map of characters and their relative relationships as an aide-memoire for reference during reading. I also worry that giving a convoluted blurb will destabilize the fine tightrope that Inherent Vice walks between homage and pastiche by impressing on you good readers a sense that the book is either i) entirely parody or ii) the opposite: utterly serious; and I wouldn't want to give the impression that the narrative leans heavier to one side than the other, so masterfully balanced is Pynchon's prose. Very briefly then: Doc Sportello is an L.A. P.I. inconveniently tasked with several simultaneous missing persons cases, one of which forces him to abandon the ideal disconnect between his work and personal life coming, as it does, at the behest of his ex-girlfriend. Predictably, all the cases are soon revealed to be eerily interconnected. Oh, and Doc's also a massive stoner.

I've always had a critical blind spot when it comes to noir; the private-eye-as-social-outlier trope, functioning beyond the law yet ironically working to uphold its vagaries, appeals to me on some level that transcends the technical flaws or problems any given work within the genre might possess. Yet for all its preoccupation with the `cool' of neo-noir, Inherent Vice is equally concerned with the ironies and moral inconsistencies of the genre. There's a definite tension between the ad hoc, casual hipness of recreational drug use, and the darker truth that such substance abuse offers a mode of escape from the genuine emotional damage that bubbles under the surface of almost every character. While it's a blast to read about Doc's frantic traversal of L.A. as he fumbles his way through various and sundry meetings with contacts and suspects, carried forward more by the impetus of luck and weed than any genuine investigative clout, there's always an underlying sense of comic pathos due to his "doper's memory" and the prevailing suggestion that behind his hardboiled, womanising and violent-cool exterior lie the more significant character traits of chronic loneliness, addiction and self-doubt. Beneath every quip, one-liner or somehow hilarious bad pun (Pynchon's penchant for those remains intact) is Doc's inveterate concern over where his next hit's gonna come from. Inherent Vice marries farce and fun with a nonetheless ubiquitous sense of buried pain and existential despair that permeates the period: drug-fuelled car chases, comic banter with the `acid guru' and constant casual sex occur in scenes deliberately contrived to highlight the emptiness and transience of such encounters, but in such a subtle way that it's left to the reader whether or not you engage with this narrative depth, or merely read the novel for the bonkers crime caper it is on the surface. Thus Pynchon forces the same choices upon both reader and characters alike: bury the emotional pain, or set it in opposition to all the psychedelic campness, and thereby potentially expose the wild, neon-lit fun as the shallow cover-up for despair and lack of direction that it maybe, maybe was all along. That's not to say that Pynchon denigrates or maligns the sixties/seventies; he's clearly enamoured and much in love with the decades of his youth, as made clear by his meticulous attention to the details of fashions, pop-culture, language etc. The onus of the story is `the sixties were free, fun and amazing' the subtext says `but we'd be foolish to want it back'. It's a lament, more than a love letter.

As you'd expect, Inherent Vice is exceptionally well written, if somewhat of a culture shock in comparison with its more bombastic forebears. Long compound-complex sentences are still the grammatical standard, but here the technical esoterica of Pynchon's earlier novels is substituted for the slang and cant argot of the sixties' L.A. idiolect, so expect to read lots of `groovies' and `bummers' along the way; a few too many, in places. Pynchon also brings forward his lively preoccupation with reproducing song lyrics, this time from the aforementioned surf rock genre. And while this works well in his earlier novels when counterpointed against his other, high culture concerns, here it falls flat: unmitigated by any austere contradictions or oppositions, the constant barrage of bad lyrics is just a bit naff, easily skipped and of mostly nostalgic significance. The homage to noir also leans dangerously close to cliché in places, never more so than when Doc begins one of his long, clearly well-rehearsed speeches about how much he hates `The Man'; a flaw mirrored in its tedium by straight-edged cop Bigfoot's parallel rants on the subject of hippy hating, and how they all need to "get a haircut".

But let's not end on a low note. Inherent Vice is, above all, just ridiculously good fun. Sure it's been somewhat mis-sold as nothing more than a frivolous and psychedelic private eye escapade; there's definitely more to it than that; but the novel's ironic handling of genre conventions and its moral examination of 1960s' social attitudes are threads that're im- rather than ex-plicit. If you're just after a frequently hilarious, convoluted but ultimately satisfying hardboiled crime adventure, then go for it; after all, there's nothing wrong with that.