Pulp addiction
By Christian Ocier
Inherent Vice
By Thomas Pynchon
Available at National Book Store
MANILA, Philippines – Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, is a “part noir, part psychedelic” detective story that plunges readers yet again into the author’s wacky world of lists and staggering ideas. This time though, the author decides to stave readers off the mind-numbing mental calories that decorated colossal powerhouses like V, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In a grain that runs along his ‘80s romp Vineland and the more succinct The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice is parenthetically steeped in the countercultural Sixties and Seventies — an angst-ridden zeitgeist of paisleys, phony Afros, narcs, hippies, psychedelic joints, flashy neon, surfers, copasetic chicks, dopey dudes, rock-and-roll, stellular sex, hallucinogenic doobies, and a plethora of tubular US subculture allusions — packed within a brisk narrative riddled with his usual raunchy lyrics and acronyms, farcical character names, and snappy dialogue.
Some critics and avid fans have labeled this novel “Pynchon Lite,” a term that carries slightly negative connotations for readers acclimated to the author’s injections of chemistry, physics, mathematical equations and theorems, probing philosophical concepts and juxtapositions of chaos and order within systems. In an uncharacteristic slant on style and content, however, Inherent Vice does away with the macrocosmic and presents a downscaled version of his dabbling in such complexities in a detective thriller of surreal “hippie metaphysics.” But Pynchon wrote it, so it is no ordinary detective thriller. Ostensibly, it is a cop story about a Scooby-Doo gumshoe who solves a mysterious murder case. On a deeper level, it is a psychological callback to the era’s “unprecedented stressfulness of life” and “dream of prerevolution,” a tale of an America disillusioned with “parables of consumer capitalism” in a “faithless, money-driven world” and the wayward politics of the Nixon regime.
Its hero, Larry (Doc) Sportello, is a feckless, Los Angeles-based private eye persuaded by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay to look into a case involving her boyfriend, the real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann. But just as this is no conventional detective thriller, Doc Sportello is no conventional private eye either. Doc lives in a funky little town called Gordita Beach, a backwater oceanside haven for bums and easy-go-lucky chums oblivious to the tides of law and mainstream culture. He is a vertically challenged and oddly charming dude who makes “up for in at-titude” what he lacks “in al-titude,” the kind of gent who flirts with karmic laws instead of forensic syllogisms. Like most of Pynchon’s heroes, Doc suffers from hysterical paranoia, although this time it’s fueled more by smoking weed rather than the foreboding of a seedy political deed.
Shasta and Mickey go missing, and thus what begins as a harmless inquest leads Doc into a number of past cases that veer 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.” The Golden Fang too may be a Vietnamese drug cartel or some shady holding company involving Mickey Wolfmann, but the list doesn’t end there.
Among the zany outcries and licentious romps of antiwar and anti-racism activists, capitalist dissenters, potheads, bombers, satyrs, nymphomaniacs, and political pinkos, Pynchon also manages to insert marijuana-tinged philosophical jabber about a Pacific Atlantis called Lemuria and hazy talk about alternate dimensions. Doc must also contend with his nemesis Detective Lt. Bigfoot Bjornsen, a snoopy head honcho of the corrupt cop kingdom of L.A.
Pynchon’s writing in this low-calorie page-turner retains many of the author’s hallmarks: an extensive grocery list of stock characters with funny names, a stylistic decadence that takes the prosaic form to the hilt, a paranoiac streak that is as eccentric as it is humorous, and a profusion of cultural minutiae specific to the period. The prose, however, is less self-indulgent and manages to be uncharacteristically compact. Similarly, the musical and artistic nitty-gritty plastered all over are fun and easily accessible inside jokes to the ‘60s-savvy reader rather than cryptic allusions that require the help of an encyclopedia. Would anyone care to look up some background information on the Japanese monster flick Ghidrah, or Henry Kissinger’s stint on The Today Show, or period euphemisms for cocaine and heroin?
Unlike the cosmopolitan vein that runs through novels like V, Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day, the premise of Inherent Vice is rooted in the period trappings of the West Coast four decades removed. This is a novel about California and Las Vegas and the New Age communes, rock ‘n’ roll concerts, clubs, druggies, dopers, hippies, and drifters that permeated an easy and laid-back region before it metamorphosed into the star-struck glam theme park of Hollywood actors, multimillion-dollar homes, cosmetic surgery joints, and cinematic multiplexes. This is a novel about the vagaries and cultural schisms of the era. This is a novel about America.
Considering the canon that precedes it, Inherent Vice admittedly reads like a watered-down development in the author’s bibliography. To neophytes normally daunted by Pynchon’s oeuvre, however, this book may very well be the most accessible introduction to his very complex fiction. While the novel is decidedly underwhelming in addressing the staple Pynchonian dichotomies between order versus chaos and the individual versus the regime, it provides nonetheless a powerful vision encapsulated in the author’s ability to envision a society fraught with problems perpetually immediate and relevant. At the novel’s close, Doc Sportello appears to portend the end of an era where a cold and impersonal unknown impinges on a life ruled formerly by freedom, individuality and privacy. Doing away with hordes of stoned hippies and the decade’s collection of groovy and gnarly paraphernalia, is it possible that the Sixties zeitgeist is coming back to haunt us?
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Christian Ocier is not your typical long-haired dude. He is a chemical engineer who occasionally veers away from trajectories and Byzantine industrial flowcharts to immerse himself in books, classical music and exotic food. After graduating from Calvin College in Michigan, Christian is likely to be found drowning in a puddle of hardcovers and paperbacks — when he is not blaring Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich or Strauss from his iPod. As staff writer for his college newspaper, the Michigan Press Association awarded him second place in its 2008 Collegiate Competition for writing art reviews. The authors who best give him a kick — along with his early morning grande — are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Mann, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov.