“Isn’t Thomas Pynchon supposed to be this great author?” He asked.
“I think so.” I hazarded, knowing Thomas Pynchon to be a famous, well-respected author as opposed to an infamous, disreputable one.
“Well, I started reading this,” he said, holding up a copy of Inherent Vice, “and I just couldn’t finish it. It got maybe a quarter of the way through before I gave up. You read it and tell me if it’s as awful as I think it is.” Thus began months of avoiding reading Thomas Pynchon. Even when I ran into the adjective “Pynchonesque” used twice in one week, surely a sign from the Heavens, I avoided reading Thomas Pynchon. Finally, my conscious continually nagging at me, I picked up Inherent Vice and began to read. I don’t know exactly how awful the Patron thinks it is but it is pretty bad.
The Protagonist of this novel is a stoner PI named Doc Sportello who shares a duplex office building in Los Angeles with a Doctor Feelgood named Dr. Buddy Tubeside; just one example of the absurd, unbelievable names the absurd, unbelievable characters sport throughout the book. A little more than halfway through I began to suspect the entire story might just turn out to be the fantasy life of an autistic child.
Doc Sportello comes off like a man unstuck in time and it was a big maddening trying to figure out exactly when this novel is supposed to take place. The jacket blurb situates the action at “the tail end of the psychedelic 60s” while the Boston Globe places the action in the Spring of 1970. However, events are mentioned that don’t take place until 1971 and late in the book Sportello receives a check and a message instructing him to be on the lookout for, “your exclusive invitation to the Grand Opening of the new and totally reconceptualized Kismet Lounge and Casino, sometime in the spring of 1972.”
Still, the timeline remains fuzzy. A character tells Sportello that he’s just read for a part on The Brady Bunch where Jan’s a brunette, an episode that first aired January 5, 1971 and he gets into a prolonged discussion of a Gilligan’s Island episode that aired the night before and new ring Ginger was sporting in it when Gilligan’s Island was cancelled in 1967. At one point it was mentioned that the trial of Charles Manson was about to start when the Manson trial opened July 24, 1970.
Pynchon uses references meant to evoke an era but they are too general to really evoke anything specific. Sure, a person might get the Archie’s 1969 hit Sugar, Sugar stuck in their heads just like they might get It’s a Long Way to Tipperary or Bitter Sweet Symphony stuck in their heads but it just isn’t evocative of California circa 1971. A fleeting mention of Thai Stick, a phrase this Reader hasn’t heard used since 1979, does more to capture the flavor of an era than all the outlandish made-up lyrics and tortured acronyms with which the author litters his prose. That the author sometimes drops in a phrase to the effect of, “like it was done back then,” at the end of a sentence just further serves to yank the already struggling Reader right out of the narrative flow.
The use of Charles Manson is quite illustrative. Manson casts a shadow over the narrative representing the dark side of Hippiedom and the impending end of an era but Manson would have been more effective if bolstered by Altamont and any of the other perceived Hippie Freak Serial Killers such as Herbert Mullin and the Zodiac who were springing up like weeds among the flower children and cast such a haze around California in the late sixties and early seventies. Manson didn’t stand alone.
Another annoying literary tic is a tendency toward futurism. Early on Sportello’s Aunt Reet, a real estate agent, waxes rhapsodic about the future potential of computers while another of the marginal detective’s marginal acquaintances has been conveniently given a computer that can access all sorts of records, including hospital admissions. Another acquaintance shows off his new remote control to his black and white television while the entire novel ends with Sportello musing about a future with telephones in automobiles and dashboard computers.
Inherent Vice is cast as a mystery but there really isn’t much mystery to it. Sportello often wanders off in a marijuana induced haze and the effects of the herb on such an experienced user such as Sportello also rings false as do the random characters who all feel compelled for no good reason to lay pages of exposition on the PI. Then there are a smattering of cringe-worthy sex scenes that seem heavily influenced by the film version of Terry Southern’s Candy. There are a couple of instances where Sportello is conveniently knocked out and others where mystical visions and remembrances of Ouija Boards past take him where he needs to be. Add to that a ship that smuggles Heroin while also running a posh drug rehab clinic, possibly in cahoots with the LAPD and soon the Reader feels as Sportello must have when someone laced his joint with PCP.
There are a couple of pages where Sportello mentions how this could bring down the administration of California’s Governor, Ronald Reagan only to have another character rip him for even allowing the sacred name of Reagan to pass through his lips. For a moment the Reader can imagine a novel where all the Golden Fang nonsense does relate back to Ronald Reagan and his California Kitchen Cabinet, including the completely perverse Alfred Bloomingdale, but, alas, this is not the novel Thomas Pynchon chose to write. Instead we have a convoluted tale of law enforcement officials consensually overdosing a drug addict with pure heroin and then inexplicably taking him to a hospital to revive him in the nick of time in order for the now presumed deceased addict to act as a mole in various organizations law enforcement entities had an interest in all while letting the supposedly dead drug addict remain in the area playing gigs.
The entire novel lacks depth and nuance, not to mention cohesion, and there is no better example of this than our hero, Doc Sportello. Living on the Beach in a surfer’s Mecca, Sportello’s love of surfing, which we never see him indulge in, and esoteric surf music, which unfortunately we do, comes off as unbelievable as the young D.A. he’s dating and her Ally McBeal length suits.
Inherent Vice is supposedly part of a “literary triptych” that includes The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990) but for this Reader Inherent Vice must stand or fall on its own merits and those merits are such that they disincline me from further exploration of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre but that me and you might have a different opinion. Inherent Vice is available at the Owen County Public Library. Check it out!
~ Laura Wilkerson
Genealogy Department, OCPL
Gilligan’s Island repeats were played five nights a week in 1970 on an LA TV station, information easily found out but that you didn't want to know. I could go on about your annoyance with the time sequence, but who cares. IV isn't the best novel and no Pynchon fan or scholar is saying it is. But to judge a piece of writing by errors and anachronisms is to discount Shakespeare and to discount the author who wrote Gravity's Rainbow by the slightest novel among the his work is as ridiculous as discounting the talent of a team one only saw lose.
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