About this title: Part noir, part psychedelic romp, and all Pynchon, "Inherent Vice" spotlights private eye Doc Sportello who occasionally comes out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era, as the free love of the 1960s slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781594202247ISBN:1594202249
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781594202247ISBN:1594202249
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Binding: Hardback
Publisher: VINTAGE Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780224089487ISBN:022408948X
Description: BRAND NEW HARDBACK. 384 pages. Private eye doc sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the l a fog. it's been awhile since doc sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer. (Hardback) read more
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: Penguin Group Usa
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781594202247ISBN:1594202249
Description: New. Part noir, part psychedelic romp, and all Pynchon, "Inherent Vice" spotlights private eye Doc Sportello who occasionally comes out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era, as the free love of the 1960s slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L. read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9781594202247ISBN:1594202249
Description: New. Items ship once payments have cleared. Media mail 5-8 days Priority 2-3 days and international orders may be subject to customs clearance procedures which can cause delays. Seasonal delays can occur in postal system. All items ship within 24 hours of receiving payment. read more
"Everyone is calling "Inherent Vice" Pynchon-Lite, but I think a more fitting way to think of it is "the lighter side of Thomas Pynchon." Really, "Inherent Vice" is a wonderful, hilarious, and almost candid opportunity to somewhat more easily digest many of the crucial themes that have preoccupied Pynchon since "V." This novel is also a fabulous period piece as well as a poignant critique of our society that extends far beyond L.A. in 1970. Indeed, the principle behind an inherent vice strikes me one of the most succinct ways of getting to the core of Pynchon's view of society, culture, and experience:
"It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in maritime insurance liked to call inherent vice. 'Is that like original sin?' Doc wondered. 'It's what you can't avoid,' Sauncho said...""
"I liked this better than anything Pynchon's written since Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's not much of a novelist in the classic sense: his plots are byzantine rambling wrecks in which loose ends are never tied up; his women are all "sexy chicks" or older female relatives; you can barely tell his characters apart if they talk for more than a couple sentences, because they all sound like Thomas Pynchon, and they certainly don't motivate his plots. But who cares? Not me, because he's the epic poet of our disintegrating age.
In Inherent Vice, Pynchon waxes nostalgic for the lost era when some of us thought that, given enough LSD, we could save our greedy real estate crazed violent society from itself. The vehicle for expressing this nostalgia is Doc Sportello, a pot-head detective who tries to stay groovy with everything, and my favorite of all Pynchon's characters, perhaps because he's more like Pynchon than any of the others, so hearing Pynchon's thoughts in Sportello's brain seems natural.
Perhaps due to age, Pynchon's gotten a bit careless about detail, or maybe I just didn't know enough about WWII to notice the time slips in Gravity's Rainbow. According to the Wiki commentary, the novel takes place between March 24th and May 8th, 1970, but during the present tense time of the narration, Lew Alcindor has already changed his name to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, which didn't happen until 1971, and the Manson trial, which didn't start until June 15th, 1970, is taking or has just taken place. Maybe it's all that pot Sportello's been smoking that keeps him from being firmly anchored in time, or maybe Pynchon was in too big a hurry to do the research needed to pin all the novel's events down firmly to one consistent time line. I've said it once, and have to say it again. Who cares when Pynchon's endlessly original and evocative poetry tumbles out of almost every page? This is a novel that's making me re-think my abhorrence of "language" literature. Most novelists can't pull it off, but in Pynchon's case, his voice is almost (except in the case of Mason & Dixon) enough."
"Pynchon, Thomas. INHERENT VICE. (2009). **. This is kind of a detective novel set in Southern California in and around L.A. in about 1970. The hero (?) is Doc Sportello who runs an independent business in the Venice Beach area of seeking out missing persons. Doc is mostly missing himself. He is usually so high on weed that he can't remember all the clues and tends to make decisions that have no basis in logic. It's a spoof on detective novels - I think. No-one could really take this novel seriously. The characters are stereotypic dopeheads or true-to-form character actors from old novels in the private eye genre. The story is told as if by "The Hippy, Dippy Weatherman," if you can remember that character. The story starts out with Doc receiving a visit from his ex-girlfriend, Shasta, who tells him about a plot to kidnap her current lover, a billionaire land developer. In his quest to find out what's going on, Doc makes the rounds of the population whose heads are invariably clouded with cannabis smoke to learn more. He works with "Bigfoot," a cop who got the nickname from his habit of kicking in doors. He surveys the potential knowledge of groups of surfers, dopers, hustlers and rock musicians, a murderous loan shark, and a surf-music saxaphone player - thought dead - working undercover. It's all too much. The humor - if that's what it was intended to be - makes you think you are watching a Cheech & Chong episode. It's not that I don't like Cheech & Chong; it's just that I can't take them for 369 pages. If you want to know what Pynchon is capable of, go back and read "Gravity's Rainbow." Skip this one."
"The New York Times called this "Pynchon Lite", and that's a fair description. It doesn't have the pyrotechnic brilliance of Gravity's Rainbow or V. You won't suddenly have an epiphany when you say "In a very warped way, this is the truth of the Reagan (er, uh, Nixon) years", as I did with Vineland. We all know the LAPD is bad news--nothing new here.
But Inherent Vice is accessible, funny, and certainly worth the time, particularly if you like your cops bad and your private eyes addled. Given the amount of dope he smokes, it's not clear how Doc Sportillo ever figures out anything--but he's not as clueless as he seems. As usual in Pynchon, paranoia plays a huge role, but it's possible to puzzle out the forces arrayed against the individual. It's even possible to realize the ways in which one is complicit with those forces, and to somehow live with that self-betrayal.
I'm not convinced that this book is about "the end of an era." Yes, Sportello is a few days shy of 30, and he ends the novel realizing that the difference between him and Bigfoot Bjornsen of the LAPD is smaller than he'd like to believe. It takes place shortly before the infamous Altamont concert, and motorcycle-riding members of the Aryan Brotherhood play key roles. But the novel doesn't feel either nostalgic nor elegaic. It's a book in which it is possible to have insight, in which it is play your own game, and even to win. It's a novel in which liberation is possible."
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