Book review: Inherent Vice

Published on Friday 7 August 2009 14:55

INHERENT VICE BY THOMAS PYNCHON Jonathan Cape, 384pp, £18.99

THIS NOVEL MIGHT COME, EVEN to ardent Pynchon-watchers, as something of a relief. It's not only far shorter than its immediate predecessors, it is also, thematically, less weighty: lighter, airier and much funnier. In fact, if it weren't for certain trademarks, you probably wouldn't have guessed the name of the author if the jacket was missing and the title page had been ripped out.

It is, basically, a Chandlerian detective story, rewritten as an episode of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Doc Sportello is very much like Philip Marlowe ("down these mean streets," as Chandler put it, "a man must go who is not himself mean"; and Sportello is very much a softie – "wallowing in sentiment", in Pynchon's words). But whereas Marlowe would unwind with a pint of bourbon, Sportello smokes heroic amounts of weed – pretty much all the time, in fact – so it is a wonder to us, as much as it is to him and those around him, that he manages to get any detective work done at all. For this is Los Angeles in 1970, and the hippy dream is collapsing on to its knees.

Actually, it makes a lot of sense, and not only comic sense (as when Sportello is so stoned that he can't remember how to use a phone), for a detective, as imagined by Pynchon, to be so baked all the time: for one of the side effects of heavy marijuana use is paranoia, and "in the business, paranoia was a tool of the trade, it pointed you in directions you might not have seen to go". And Pynchon, especially in his 1966 masterpiece The Crying of Lot 49, plays paranoia with concert-standard virtuosity.

The plot is so archetypally Chandlerian that you might think at times that this is nothing more than a pastiche. A property developer goes missing, presumably kidnapped. His girlfriend is Sportello's ex and he becomes concerned; meanwhile, a black man called Tariq Khalil hires Sportello to look for one Glen Charklock, who has disappeared, owing Khalil a lot of money. Sportello agrees to take on the case without any payment upfront, at which point we get this memorable piece of dialogue, which as far as I know has not yet featured in a film, but really should: "Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherf***er." "How can you tell?" "I counted." (Wisecracking dialogue like this, very reminiscent of Elmore Leonard, is plentiful in the book, especially between Sportello and his rival/nemesis on the police force, "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, and contributes hugely to the pleasure to be had in reading it.)

Naturally, all plots are intertwined, their nexus being the sinister Golden Fang organisation. There are sinister dentists, crazy rock bands, sackloads of fake currency with Nixon's face on them, conspiracies within conspiracies and hints of things to come: ARPAnet, the precursor of the internet (it existed), a proto-Gaia hypothesis, intimations of the rise of Ronald Reagan.

But do not expect a particularly rounded novel. There might be serious themes bubbling under the surface, enough to make it more than a pure diversion, but it is what Graham Greene might have called an "entertainment". The names are consistently daft (Trillium Fortnight, Hugo Bordlerline). All the girls who turn up unannounced in Sportello's office, or whom he meets on his rounds, are gorgeous, biddable and wearing extremely short skirts. However Pynchon is trying to ape Chandler, he is not in his range of memorable characters. In fact, this is all a bit silly, really – but, handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, is as much fun to read as anything you will come across this summer. And how long has it been since Pynchon was fun?