The cover art is ripe Elmore Leonard hardcover cheese, but Thomas Pynchon’s latest is a private-eye novel only as much as El Topo is a cowboy picture. That is to say, Inherent Vice’s creator has earnestly followed a genre framework but his own obsessions have thoroughly colonized the genre, put their feet up on its genre couch, sparked a big fat joint and exhaled in its genre face.
Set in the patchouli-stinking end of 1960s Los Angeles, Inherent Vice follows Doc Sportello, a private eye who is also a “head.” (His agency is named LSD, or “Location, Surveillance, Detection.”) His ex has disappeared after tipping him off concerning a mobster and real estate developer about to be kidnapped. Soon, there’s a bent cop poking into the matter and hassling Sportello: all par for the Chandler course. But within the first 100 pages, ARPANET, ideas of entropy, lost civilizations, junkie surf bands, Philip K. Dick–style paranoia and, yes, hilarity, all ensue, giving the plot the dense interlacing of an algae bloom that never stops growing.
Given that quick rundown, you may detect a hashy whiff of The Big Lebowski (and its source text, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye), but Pynchon uses no protective irony in regard to telling a mystery set in the counterculture. Almost every character is high — and there are pages where you feel high with them, drifting along before snapping back and exclaiming, “oh yeah, I totally get it” — but Pynchon is almost always in control. Every other line is either deadpan funny or sublimely strange, yet doesn’t detract from Sportello’s quest.
A beatnik at heart, Pynchon can also riff majestically, as in his page-long description of morning in Gordita: “everybody was either at the tables along the sidewalk, sleeping with their heads on Health Waffles or in bowls of vegetarian chili…. Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpoint to the feeling in everybody’s skin of desert winds and heat and restlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid, and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies.”
Like all mysteries, how we get to the end is more important than the solution, but the greater mystery of Inherent Vice is the delicate tonal balance Pynchon strikes. There’s his rollicking, Joycean love of jokes and fake texts (I really wish “Soul Gidget,” a rare attempt at “black surf music,” were a real song) but the novel is also shot through with the complex melancholy of knowing that a particular dreamtime is coming to an end.