Sammy and Beckett’s Book Blog

I was so excited to read Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Inherent Vice that I went out and bought the hardcover version, something that never happens more than once or twice a year. What could be better than a private eye story set in the Sixties beach towns of greater Los Angles? Perhaps it is inevitable with that level of excitement, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. As a detective mystery it had all the plot turns and twists that one would expect from Pynchon’s powerful imagination. However, it doesn’t reach the level of seedy darkness and human despair that underlies the works of genre greats like Chandler and Hammett. And it’s commentary on the Sixties hangs on a light stoner humor. A humor which feels removed from the era when contrasted with the introspection of writers of the time like Hunter S. Thompson, whose narrator and alter ego in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas memorably mused:

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

In contrast Pynchon’s protagonist Doc sounds underdeveloped and caricatured:

And here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little, parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and subbing it out for good.

The book contains many passages like the quote above, where Doc momentarily strives for seriousness but is unable to shake off the novel’s defensively humorous tone long enough to make it stick. This limbo between seriousness and farce is somewhat awkward — about as awkward as a free spirit private eye wading through greedy and violent underbelly of surf culture.

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