Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon (2009)
2022 reads, 11/20:
“Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.”
This novel was an absolute pleasure to not just read, but immerse myself in. Like a few novels I’ve read this year, Inherent Vice takes place in 1970s SoCal, and follows private eye ‘Doc’ Sportello as he tries to help out an ex who discovered a murder plot against her real-estate mogul boyfriend. The novel follows Doc as he meets many zany characters, such as ultra-conservative police lieutenant “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, on-the-run sax-player Coy Harlingen, and maritime lawyer Sauncho Smilax.
The novel follows Doc and these characters in the context of the tension between counterculture (mainly symbolized by Doc) and anti-counterculture (mainly symbolized by Bigfoot) in the wake of the Manson murders. Those who ran in Doc’s circles usually had friction with those who ran in Bigfoot’s circles.
“[The police station] creeped him out, the way it just sat there looking so plastic and harmless among the old-time good intentions of all that downtown architecture, no more sinister than a chain motel by the freeway, and yet behind its neutral drapes and far away down its fluorescent corridors it was swarming with all this strange alternate cop history and cop politics—cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good—insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all been given to control, or, as they liked to put it, protect and serve.”
I’ve heard this work described as Pynchon’s most accessible work (Pynchon-lite, if you will), and I may not be on best authority to throw my two cents in (the only other book of his I’ve read was The Crying of Lot 49), but I still think this is very much his style. While the plot in this one is a bit more sensible than TCoL49, there are still those delightful tangents that Pynchon takes in his writing. That being said, the novel can get complex pretty quickly, solely because of the number of characters, so I recommend this wonderful resource which diagrams the character relations for each chapter.
“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 counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, 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.”
#readingyear2022 #humor #physicallyowned #book2screen #pynchon