Penguin Press | 2009 | 369 pages | List price: $27.95 | Get it for less at Amazon

Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, INHERENT VICE, takes place at an interesting time sociologically, as southern California begins to face the reality that the bright days of sun and surf have now turned into something much darker. Set in Los Angeles as the 1970s are just getting underway, the novel examines a culture that is in transition, making its way from the free love and drug induced altered states of consciousness of the late 60s to one of a paranoia and fear, creating a realization that the belief systems of both the hippie movement as well as the establishment itself are becoming outmoded. There is still a war going on thousands of miles away in Vietnam and Los Angelenos are still reeling from the attacks perpetrated by the Manson family in 1969 that tinged the undercurrents of the freedom the hippie lifestyle suggested with the reality of the threat of social uprising and revolution. Trapped within this world is the central character in Pynchon’s novel, Doc Sportello, a hippie private investigator who spends more time getting high than he does actually working on a case. After a visit from an ex-girlfriend, Sportello suddenly finds himself immersed in a dangerous world as he tries to decipher what has happened to her current boyfriend, the billionaire land developer Mickey Wolfmann. While the era that Pynchon chose to set the novel in is fertile ground in which to mine intrigue, and while the characters could provide for fascinating story arcs, the fact is, the novel falls short, and Pynchon unfortunately allows it to devolve into stereotype pretty quickly.

Looking first at the character of Sportello himself, there is no real development. It does not matter if one is on page three or on page three hundred, the Sportello that is there is exactly the same. While it is true that Pynchon completely creates a very believable hippie character in Sportello, how is the audience supposed to stay engaged if he never changes, and more importantly, why should they sympathize with him? Sportello will stumble across some piece of information, light a joint, and mutter something like “groovy.” Over and over again. There are some hints in there that Sportello really is a skilled investigator, but Pynchon lets them become quickly obscured by a cloud of pot smoke just as quickly as he reveals them. Sportello just seems to float through all of the events without really ever truly experiencing them. He is just there for the ride like the reader, but the reality is, the ride grows tiresome very quickly. Having a P.I. who is trying to remain clear-headed long enough to solve a case could create a comedic novel, or having a surf music loving hippie who finds that the world around him has begun to change without him could provide for a more dramatic and character based work on isolationistic feelings of being disenfranchised with the system. Sportello represents neither. He just merely exists, never really feeling much of anything one way or the other although he is trying to help those around him. The result is a character that becomes more stereotypical and shallow than fully realized.

Continuing the trend of never going beneath the superficial in regard to character, Pynchon includes a detective character “Bigfoot” Bjornsen from the LAPD. Seemingly stripped verbatim from a dime store pulp detective fiction novel, Bigfoot becomes the ultimate personification of stereotype. A gruff cop who despises hippies, Bigfoot walks around eating frozen bananas, as if Pynchon figured that since Kojak had a lollipop, his detective must have a trademark as well. Beyond that, there is not much more to the character. There are some dynamics established between Sportello and Bigfoot, and a few scenes where they discuss things with one another, including why Bigfoot no longer has a partner, but once again, those are merely cliché. Had the novel really focused in on the opposition of the two main characters and the conflict between them as they realize that they each need one another’s help to solve the case, a much stronger, and much more coherent novel would have emerged.

Unfortunately this is not the case though and Pynchon allows his novel to meander from one ridiculous scene to another with no real true interconnectedness with a plot. In fact, if one were to try and write out a synopsis of the events of the main plot, it in itself would end up sounding like the drug induced ramblings of a stoned out of their mind hippie. The plot at one point suggests corruption within the LAPD, at another deals with the Feds and the mob in Vegas, at another involves a hippie geodesic housing development in the desert and then later takes the reader on a boat chase in mythical thirty-five foot swells off the coast of California with the Coast Guard and Department of Justice as they pursue a drug and counterfeiting cartel. And of course all of this with numerous references to the Manson family. If it sounds confusing, it is. The plot, like the characters, seems to be lifted from a bad b-movie and is littered with so many periphery characters that the reader can never really get into the action, or in the end, care about any of it.

To order directly from Amazon for less, CLICK HERE.

Rating: