Inherent Vice: A Novel, By Thomas Pynchon 

Penguin, 384 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Sean McCann

Thomas Pynchon may be our last great Calvinist writer. Since the publication of his first novel V. in 1963, a dark spirit of pessimism has brooded often over his work, and foreboding hints of wrathful divinity, hovering just beyond the outer limits of our awareness, have frequently cropped up in the margins of his narratives. “Paranoia” is the mode of this Pynchon—a disposition, indulged as much by his narrators as by his characters, to see everywhere the signs of nefarious intrigue behind the apparent accidents of history. Sin and the distant promise of retribution are restlessly at work in this world.

But the darkly suspicious Pynchon has always been countered by the writer who once hoped to give his bleakest novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the more cheerful title, “Mindless Pleasures.” This is the Pynchon who shrugs off the doomsday on the horizon and, glorying in the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, finds a promise of grace in cheap puns, low pleasures, and slapstick pratfalls. He yearns, one could say, not for the God of just anger, but for a divinity of love and happiness.

No context could be better chosen to stage the conflict between these impulses than the setting of Pynchon’s latest novel, <i>Inherent Vice</i>. Gordita Beach, California, 1970, is a fictionalized version of the Manhattan Beach where Pynchon himself lived in the late sixties, and in Pynchon’s telling, the community appears a folksy enclave of surfers, hippies, and freaks huddled together against the growing chill of the Nixon years.  Few literary forms, too, could be better suited to exploring the tension between grace and retribution than Southern California’s indigenous genre, the hard-boiled detective story.  Not only is the fictional private eye traditionally imagined as a man-in-the-middle, trapped between the rigid, or corrupt, authority of the police and a lawless underworld.  The hard-boiled gumshoe himself has always been a deeply ambivalent figure, both vigilante and man of mercies, divided between his drive to punish wrongdoers and his inclination to comfort the hapless clients and victims who come his way.

The masters of the hard-boiled crime tradition have explored the full spectrum of possibilities lying between those impulses, ranging, for example, between the righteous vengeance of Mickey Spillane and the exquisite sympathy of Ross Macdonald.  Pynchon’s particular contribution is to imagine a stoner gumshoe and set him amid a cultural landscape poised between the heady freedom of the 1960s counterculture and the brewing resentment of the New Right.  His “Doc” Sportello, the proprietor and sole employee of  L. S. D. Investigations (“Location, Surveillance, Detection”) is a devoted pothead and the last of the private eyes, a lone hold-out amid an increasingly “cop-happy” society fascinated by the glamor of television police and inured to the expanding power of the federal law enforcement apparatus. 

The result is a brilliant fantasia on the detective story. Doc Sportello seizes every chance he gets to light up a joint, and he is surrounded by a rich ecosystem of acid gurus, surfer mystics, sexual libertines, and plain old druggies. But in most other respects Pynchon’s hero looks a lot like the classic private eye—solitary, honorable, resourceful, and struggling to do the decent thing before a sea of temptation. The novel begins as Doc is approached by a beautiful lady in distress. His former lover Shasta Fay Hepworth, now the paramour of corrupt land developer Mickey Wolfmann, appears in the middle of the night to share her intuition that malevolent plots swirl around her new benefactor. When Shasta and Mickey disappear shortly thereafter, Doc Sportello steps into action. His quest to find Shasta soon immerses him in a tangled labyrinth that descends recognizably from the world of Raymond Chandler. Scheming gold diggers and louche playboys, predatory cults and slick con men, suave gangsters and thuggish gunmen, bullying cops and their politically ambitious superiors, corrupt aristocrats and their wandering daughters—all of these cross Doc Sportello’s path and threaten to ensnare him in their designs. 

 But if Inherent Vice makes use of the time-honored conventions of the hard-boiled crime story, Pynchon infuses this material with his characteristic manic energy and madcap invention. Hard-boiled crime fiction has always had a bias toward profuse action and disorderly plot. Pynchon embraces the tendency with gusto, multiplying his novel’s countless plots and subplots, reveling in his usual Dickensian range of characters (Sauncho Smilax, the maritime lawyer; Trillium Fortnight, the hapless ingénue; Crocker Fenway, the corrupt aristocrat; Adrian Prussia, the ruthless gangster, to name but a few), and narrating all in a breathless prose style that heaps up clause upon clause in paragraph-long sentences that romp in the mash-up of high and low culture. Ultimately, the hope that we’ll discover a single coherent design behind the book’s manifold events must subside beneath delight or exhaustion.  

More importantly, perhaps, Pynchon uses the vehicle of the detective story to explore the moral and metaphysical dilemmas that run through all his fiction. Like most private-eyes, and like the protagonists of all Pynchon’s novels, Doc Sportello is confronted with an existential dilemma that forces him to choose between the seductions of fear and the generosity of freedom and love. Doc himself imagines that, when he is solicited by a rivalrous cop who would like to entice him into working for the law, he resembles the Christ who is tempted by Satan with dominion over the world. (As if to coyly underscore the theme, Pynchon ends the novel on the historical date of his own thirty-third birthday.)  Perhaps the most surprising feature of the novel is not only that Doc makes the right choice, but that, despite the novel’s frequent laments for the declining counterculture—a “little parenthesis of light” doomed to be squelched by the tides of reaction—the story ends on a wistful note of hopefulness and delight.