Pynchon fans find familiar territory
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INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Press, $27.95
The reclusive Pynchon, author of V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Mason & Dixon, Vineland and others, is practically a cult figure.
Whenever he publishes a book, and he does so every few years, his legion of fans make it an instant best-seller. They know what to expect from Pynchon: quirky plots, dense dialog peppered with arcane references to pop culture, philosophy, religion and history, and, always, heroes who seem to be part of the establishment but really aren’t. They’re anti-heroes. His latest creation is Doc Sportello, a Southern California private investigator who is a hippy surfer dope head at heart.
Pynchon seems to be channeling Raymond Chandler — but not imitating him. Sportello is no Philip Marlowe. It’s the hardboiled tone that is familiar: “As if auditioning for widowhood, Sloane Wolfmann strolled in from poolside wearing black spike-heeled sandals, a headband with a sheer black veil, and a black bikini if negligible size made of the same material as the veil. She wasn’t exactly an English rose, maybe more like an English daffodil, very pale, blond, reedy, probably bruised easily, overdid the makeup like everybody else. Miniskirts were invented for young women like her.”
The time is the ’60s, and Doc is involved in a complex case that involves his old girlfriend, Shasta, who has gone missing along with Sloane’s husband, Mickey Wolfmann. Before Doc can make any headway on the case, he gets drawn into another mystery involving an ex-con looking for an old associate who owes him a debt. He wants Doc to find the associate. Doc does, right about the time the guy is killed. Pretty soon Doc mixes it up with some bikers, a cop appropriately named “Bigfoot” Bjornsen and a mysterious organization called “The Golden Fang,” which owns a big ocean-going schooner and might be up to no good but may actually be just a fraternal order of dentists. Lot of other characters with unusual names (Fritz Drybeam, Japonica, Rudy Blatnoyd, Arthur Tweedle, Puck Beaverton) populate Pynchon’s tale. Much marijuana is smoked and some sex occurs, neither of which leads Doc to the solution of his cases — which are, of course, one case.
Pynchon leads readers into and out of complex and confusing cultural references (his fans love this). When one of his characters, saxophone player Coy Harlingen, goes undercover at a political rally, Pynchon needs a villian so he resurrects Richard Nixon.
Watching a television news report, Doc sees “Nixon had indeed dropped in, as if on a whim, at the palatial Westside hotel to address a rally of GOP activists who called themselves Vigilant California. In cutaways to individuals in the audience, some seemed a little out of control, like you’d expect to find at gathering like this, but others were less demonstrative and, to Doc at least, scarier. Strategically posted among the crowd, wearing identical suits and ties, you’d have to call on the unhip side, none of them seemed to be paying much attention to Nixon himself.”
Pynchon evokes the misplaced innocence of the ’60s well. The streets are full of muscle cars with big engines and custom paint jobs, beautiful young women practice a free love philosophy, dope is benign and available, the big threats to happiness are Vietnam and the fascist police state that wants to keep free-spirited “heads” from enjoying rock music and psychedelic drugs.
Doc visits a party at the communal residence of a band called The Boards — “for a week or so now, the Boards’ houseguest had included Spotted Dick, a visiting British band who were getting some local airplay on those stations where the pulse was less hectic, being themselves often so laid back that people had been known to call an ambulance, mistaking the band’s idea of a General Pause for some kind of collective seizure. Today they were wearing wide-wale corduroy suits in strangely luminous brownish gold and sporting precision geometric haircuts form Cohen’s Beauty and Barber Shop in East London, where Vidal Sassoon had once apprenticed and where every week the lads were piled onto a small bus, given their weekly cannabis allowance and brought out to sit in a row giggling over back issues of Tatler and Queen and getting scissor-cut asymmetric bobs.”
That’s the gist of what Pynchon is doing: waxing nostalgic for a more innocent time before AIDS, the energy crisis, global warming, Sept. 11, the war on terrorism, Katrina and the Internet. The detective story is just a device to make commentary on a lost era.
Thomas Pychon’s writing can be difficult, oblique and filled with odd references. But sometimes it’s clear and luminous, poetic: “They stood in the street light through the kitchen window there’d never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.” Both these tendencies keep Pynchon’s fans reading this book and anticipating his next.
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