M@ reviewed Inherent vice by Thomas Pynchon
Review of 'Inherent vice' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
"Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I’ve never thought of you as any less than professional."
When you get right down to brass tacks and other upholstery elements, certified MacArthur genius [a:Thomas Pynchon|235|Thomas Pynchon|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1344580482p2/235.jpg]'s novel is either a biography or a love story. It's either a biography of circa-1970 LA, specifically the weedier portions of town, close to the beach and addicted to the waves, or it's a love story between Lawrence "Doc" Sportella and a mercurial woman who goes only by the name "Mary Jane" and appears rather often. The middle entity smokes an awful lot of the last entity while living in, driving around, and solving a mystery in the first entity.
"Yeah, I was planning to report him to the Dope Fiend Standards and Ethics Committee."
Just like Jeff Lebowski was Philip Marlowe, but transplanted to 1991 and updated from scotch to pot, Sportello …
"Hair and drug-use issues notwithstanding, I’ve never thought of you as any less than professional."
When you get right down to brass tacks and other upholstery elements, certified MacArthur genius [a:Thomas Pynchon|235|Thomas Pynchon|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1344580482p2/235.jpg]'s novel is either a biography or a love story. It's either a biography of circa-1970 LA, specifically the weedier portions of town, close to the beach and addicted to the waves, or it's a love story between Lawrence "Doc" Sportella and a mercurial woman who goes only by the name "Mary Jane" and appears rather often. The middle entity smokes an awful lot of the last entity while living in, driving around, and solving a mystery in the first entity.
"Yeah, I was planning to report him to the Dope Fiend Standards and Ethics Committee."
Just like Jeff Lebowski was Philip Marlowe, but transplanted to 1991 and updated from scotch to pot, Sportello is Marlowe transported to 1970. Given that Marlowe is just Holmes, but moved to 1940's LA, and that we've seen Holmes transplanted to present-day London, present-day New York, and a hospital, it's not entirely unreasonable. It seems almost like an excuse for Pynchon to paint both a vivid portrait of this time and place, but to write himself a hard-boiled crime novel. I was braced for the baddest similies and metaphors ever deployed in peacetime, and oh wait, here comes one now:
ON CERTAIN DAYS, DRIVING INTO SANTA MONICA WAS LIKE having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.
Ah, that's the stuff right there, a smokey sip of the expensive barrel-aged whiskey of literature. There are quite a few of these little gems. And it, at times, feels like the central mystery exists only to allow colorful descriptions like these, brilliantly-drawn supporting characters (like Trillium Fortnight, Bigfoot Bjornsen, Sloane Wolfmann, Rudy Blatnoyd DDS), and observations about politics and culture. Here, for instance, is a commentary on the delicate relationship between local and federal law enforcement:
You could catch the FBI in the act of sodomizing the president in the Lincoln Memorial at high noon and local law enforcement would still just have to stand around and watch, getting more or less nauseated depending which president.
Hard not to dig stuff like this, huh?
