Book review: With his seventh novel, Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon invents a new genre, marijuana noir
July 27th, 2009 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Books, Editor's Desk
On the surface, Thomas Pynchon’s seventh novel — Inherent Vice, in stores Tues., Aug. 4 — bears very little relation to his previous six. Set in post-Manson 1969 LA, it follows the established arc of the hard-boiled noir: PI Doc Sportello finds himself caught up with a dame, murder and traces of corruption that hint at much bigger crimes; gets his head cracked in a couple or three times; emerges from the underbelly, maybe even with a bit of wisdom in tow.
Pynchon has rarely plotted a book so conventionally. V. features a fractured narrative that splits modern-day adventuring with historical summoning; The Crying of Lot 49 comes to its end right before the major announcement that would give meaning to what has come before; Gravity’s Rainbow flies off the handle entirely, with a third act featuring a light bulb as a major character. Mason & Dixon follows its titular pair from start to finish, but bawdy side-stories swipe the drama at every opportunity, while Against the Day — Pynchon’s most recent book, and his longest, at 1,085 pages — ranges from the American West to Siberia to the Balkans on the eve of World War I.
But despite its uncharacteristic focus and brevity, it’s clear from sentence structure alone that Inherent Vice could have only sprung from the pen of Thomas Pynchon. One early sentence describing an LA dry spell goes like this: “In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there’d only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight.”
Other Pynchon trademarks are in full effect: his love of terrible puns (one even plays on the stage name of one Sean “Puffy” Combs), his characters’ tendency to break out in the occasional song, his whipcrack dialogue (“You are one crazy white motherfucker.” “How can you tell?” “I counted.”).
Pynchon is working new territory here, though, and he indulges in an unprecedented amount of stoner humor while he spins his yarn. Subplots depict the use of ARPANET — the connected-computer system that would become the Internet — to surveil subversives, environmental degradation at the hands of developers and the general falling away of any kind of amplified collective consciousness.
The other Pynchon book Inherent Vice most resembles is in fact Vineland, his 1990 novel about hippie holdouts scraping by in northern California. But whereas Vineland took a nostalgic look back from the perspective of 1984, Vice directly depicts the forces of control reasserting their power in often violent ways after the excesses of the ’60s.
And that’s where Vice fits squarely into the Pynchon canon. Pynchon’s great theme has always been the struggle between the ruthless engine of capitalist power and the individualists, dropouts and adventurers who refuse to play the game of money and authority. In V., that conflict was played out in the battle between history with a capital H and the real, lived history of actual peoples; in Lot 49, between paranoia and actual conspiracy; in Gravity’s Rainbow, between the giants of the Cold War and the anarchists fighting to build something new in the ruins of World War II; in Vineland, between the dwindling hippie freaks and the war on drugs; in Mason & Dixon, between the wide-open American continent and the political forces dueling to control it; in Against the Day, between the emerging robber-baron order and the free-ranging actors of the West.
The individualists usually lose out. That’s why Vice, breaking with noir tradition, ends on a ruminative, melancholy note: Our hero, Doc Sportello, may have solved the case, but time is short for the collection of beachside outcasts he loves so dearly. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll never stood a chance against law, order, conformity, dollars and, perhaps most pointedly, the Internet. As a character tells Doc about his pet ARPANET program: “The system has no use for souls. Not how it works at all. Even this thing about going into other people’s lives? it isn’t like some Eastern trip of absorbing into a collective consciousness. It’s only finding stuff out that somebody elses didn’t think you were going to.”
Read an excerpt from Inherent Vice here.
Book jacket courtesy Tracy Locke
November 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
[...] we have the Miami Herald, the New Yorker, the NYT, the Times and Guardian, the LA Times and Creative Loafing (who coin the winning phrase “marijuana noir”), and pretty much any other reputable and [...]