A new book from Thomas Pynchon is always a big deal.
Fans may not camp out in front of bookstores Harry Potter-style, but
bookish people celebrate new novels from the reclusive author in an
excited, covetous mood that most people reserve for expensive tickets
to rock concerts. The release of Inherent Vice (it went on sale
Tuesday, August 4) is an especially big deal. It doesn’t resemble the
physical shape of his other novels, which are traditionally ponderous
and sprawling and messy. And while many of his books toy with genre,
the slim, breezy Vice is unabashedly a mystery.
Everything about Vice, from its ugly, neon-lettered cover to
its down-on-his-luck private investigator Doc Sportello, positively
reeks with the pungent odor of the dime-store gumshoe thriller. It
begins, as all good mysteries do, with a woman from Doc’s past
(“Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he
remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look”) wandering
back into his life with a problem in tow. Vice is set in the
late ’60s and Doc is an unrepentant, dope-smoking dropout, the backwash
of the Woodstock generation. He smokes his joints down to nothingness
and his memory is a clouded, cottony haze.
Doc “automotively gropes” around Los Angeles in his nondescript car,
not so much actively trying to solve the mystery as asking his friends
what they think he should do about it. Along the way, an enormous
conspiracy controlled by an organization called the Golden Fang
distracts him. It’s a name right out of a Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu
thriller, and the building that may or may not serve as the
organization’s headquarters is pure pulp: a six-story ornate golden
fang, supposedly populated with dentists’ offices.
Pynchon hasn’t been this accessible since The Crying of Lot
49. He’s obviously having fun, and it’s hard not to picture him
giggling at his typewriter as he plowed through page after page of
Vice. The narrative is festooned with digressions and details
that mirror Doc’s addle-brained thought processes and also function as
a kind of secondary language, making Vice a tone poem
constructed from American cultural detritus.
Like any paranoid ex-hippie, Doc maintains a healthy belief in
conspiracies. As he searches for someone named Wolfmann, he keeps
uncovering information about Atlantis and its lesser-known Pacific
Ocean sister city, Lemuria. Doc wrestles with these layers of
conspiracy, many of which don’t exist until his pot-fogged brain
creates them, and reveals the book’s central conflict: Vice is
about the way our practical, hairy ape brains can scuttle their own
ambitions by idly creating strange fictions that then become too real
to ignore. It’s a battle that has raged through most of Pynchon’s work
in one way or another.
Beneath it all, surfacing sporadically like a cheap serial villain,
is the nascent internet, which in the late ’60s was called the ARPAnet.
One of Doc’s friends introduces him to the prototypical World Wide Web,
and he increasingly relies on it for information. He wonders why
“they”—the men he’s positive rule the world from a smoke-filled
room—don’t make it illegal, the way “they” criminalized acid.
Pynchon, doing some of the nimblest, most whimsical work of his career,
doesn’t provide the answer to that mystery, or many of the mysteries in
Vice for that matter, but he shares his infectious excitement
about living in a world full of useless, beautiful ideas. For Pynchon,
it’s not the truth but the search for the truth that matters.