false 5933841 1594202249 9781594202247 693 236 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255576260m/5933841.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5933841.Inherent_Vice 235 Thomas Pynchon 21553 2761 4 0 false Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 23 23:30:54 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 23 23:50:45 -0700 2009 Mason & Dixon, which I think is a character flaw, since every time I resolve to pick it up and soldier on, I enjoy a few pages and then don't read it; and I doubt there were five minutes in which reading Against the Day appealed to me. But here we have Pynchon actually resolving things (as he refused to do in, say, The Crying of Lot 49, but that was 1964) in a pastiche mystery that the reviews (particularly an astonishingly lame one by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, which surprised me) all mistakenly link to Hammett-Chandler, maybe because that's all they've read. In fact, it's a prototypical Ross Macdonald late-60s LA doom plotline, mixed with a bit of James Ellroy's muckraking. Plus The Big Lebowski<i/>. (Interesting, though irrelevant, sidenote: while driving today it occurred to me that Adventureland has almost exactly the same plot as Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Ponder that, if you will.) Plus lots of pothead humor, stoned epiphanies, the Internet (in 1969!), gratuitous weird names (Jason Velveeta! Sauncho Smilax!), and lots and lots and lots of conspiracy theories. And there are odd echoes of other Pynchon, like the "screaming comes across the sky," a reference to the opening line of Gravity's Rainbow, here deployed to describe the maniacal laugh at the start of the Surfaris' "Wipeout." Which fits, and which, given the expertise and love devoted to obscure surf-music 45s here, kinda makes me wonder if in fact Pynchon had an image or vision of that song playing on the soundtrack in his head when he sat down in the late 60s(?), I assume, to get going on GR.

Not everybody is buying it. The New York magazine review hated the book, adding, among other choice epithets,

tedious, shallow, monotonous, flippant, self-satisfied, and screamingly unfunny. I hate his aesthetic from floor to ceiling: the relentless patter of his Borscht Belt gags, his parodically overstuffed plots, his ham-fisted verbs (scowling, growling, glaring, leering, lurching) and adjectives (lurid, louche, lecherous), the tumbling micro-rhythms of his sentences, the galloping macro-rhythms of his larger narratives. I hate the discount paranoia he slathers over everything with an industrial-size trowel. I hate the cardboard cutouts he tries to pass off as human characters, and I hate—maybe most of all—his characters’ stupid names. (I even hate his name, which makes him sound like some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster.)

I can't really argue with that, but I guess I still enjoy the game, or the pretension of meaning, or something. In the end, I got real pleasure from this. Not supposed-to-feel pleasure. Not gee-it's-Pynchon-so-if-I-don't-get-it-I'm-a-dummy pleasure. Not wanna-look-cool pleasure. It was fun, even if enjoying it is bad for me.]]>