Inherent Vice
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Read the cult classic behind the major new film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin.
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.
It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there...or...if you were there, then you...or, wait, is it...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry \x93Doc\x94 Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. We\x92re in early-\x9270s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon\x92s recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away. It all starts with Pynchon\x92s least conspicuous intro ever: \x93She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to\x94\x97she being Doc\x92s old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big\x92s strings is always a villain even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon\x92s unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard\x92s exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there\x92s a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly suggestive setting, the novel\x92s bones need only a touch of the screenwriter\x92s dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American literature\x92s most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable. Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon\x92s developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition\x97yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he\x92s more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity\x92s Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific.
