The International Writers Magazine: Fiction

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon • Mathews Clews Following in the hard-boiled tradition of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Pynchon has thrown his hat into the ring, quite naturally with a hazy, paranoid Pynchon twist, by writing this post-noir stoner detective romp set in the fictional Californian beach town of Gordita Beach.

 

The forgetful protagonist, Doc Sportello – a private investigator – is a product of the sixties counter-culture and still living by their codes and lifestyle.  He is a lone-ranger, always on the side of the underdog … and stoned most of the time.  The story begins, as a lot of Pynchon books do (see The Crying Lot of 49 and Vineland) with the ghostly past catching up with the protagonist – this time in the guise of Doc Sportello's ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth.  Shasta has been seeing a real-estate mogul with criminal connections, Mickey Wolfmann, and has become involved in a plot to rob him of his fortune – and surprise surprise she needs Doc's help.  After her visit with Doc she disappears into the oblivion of the novel until called upon again.

Doc then finds Tariq Khalil, an ex-con, at his LSD Investigations office, which resides next to Dr. Tubeside's practice – where the good doctor administers amphetamines under the pseudonym 'b₁₂ injections' to bored housewives and struggling actors needing prepped up before auditions.  Tariq wants Doc to take a job in locating someone he knew from prison.  When Doc goes investigating at a massage parlour, he is knocked unconscious from behind and becomes the suspect of a murder.  Wolfmann has also disappeared off the radar, with no one knowing whether he is dead or alive.

 

The novel progresses through conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, all weaved into a complex and hard to follow web.  The prose are mellow and hop along smoothly to the sound of the surf and the cool vibes of Doc's baked consciousness.  It must be said that this is Pynchon's most accessible novel by a long shot.  Compared to his last novel, Against the Day, a mammoth novel leading up the First World War, covering labor unrest, anarchism and the scientific and mathematical theories of the day – Inherent Vice is a cool, trippy drive through the shadow-laden noir of Southern California.  In typical Pynchonian mannerisms, the book is rife with oddball characters from the sinister law-enforcement nemesis – Bigfoot Bjornsen, to clairvoyant acid-head mystics obsessed with the sunken continent of Lemuria; bikers, ominous dentists, evil acronymic organizations, ladies of ill repute and the usual variety of Pynchonian drop-outs and misfits operating at the very fringes of society and the law.  There is inevitably a lot of weed and a lot of stoner humor; from baked tube sessions of Gulliver's Travels to the ideological analysis of television commercials as well as Doc's attempts to piece together the conspiracies with his 'dopers memory', which provides a chuckle or two.

 

In the background to all the surf-noir, back alley meetings and night fog, are the spectral silhouettes of the recent Manson murders – the bête noire of the straight citizens of California, plunging them into irrational paranoia over the 'psychotic hippies'.  It is no surprise that the novel is set in the spring of 1970, with Nixon recently in government, that all the ill vibes and entropy occur.

 

Fist of the law, officer Bigfoot Bjornsen, the arch-nemesis to Sportello, seems to be connected to a lot of strange and perhaps illicit goings-on in the area around Gordita Beach – with Nixon in government and the Manson murders a convenient pretext for constitutional violations by the state – the law enforcement agencies of the land are implied to have ploughed their tentacles into even more sinister places, hinting at the beginnings of widespread institutional corruption and disregard for the supposed law that they are meant to be upholding, eerily foreshadowing the Watergate scandal.

 

Doc finds out about the boat The Golden Fang, which may or may not be connected to Mickey Wolfmann, and may or may not be embroiled in the web of conspiracy that precedes its arrival in the novel – much like the clandestine postal service in The Crying of Lot 49.  Plot lines trail off into obscurity, characters appear only to bring a new conspiracy into the lap of Doc Sportello, only to disappear and never be seen again and things forget to be said amongst the weed haze that permeates the four corners of this book – in some ways the narrative, I suppose it could be said, mirrors the inside of Doc's fried brain.

 

'Inherent Vice' is a maritime term, which describes the notion that certain items of cargo cannot be insured due to their ontological nature – for example – fragile glass is prone to break precisely because it's fragile.  Given Pynchon's thematic penchant for entropy, perhaps buried amongst the clutter of pop-cultural name dropping and stoner humor, lies a statement Pynchon is trying to make about the dissipating nature of counter-culture itself. 
© Matthew Clews August 2010
mattclews at hotmail.com
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