Victor
Billot reviews Inherent Vice.
INHERENT VICE
Thomas Pynchon
Random,$38.99, pbk
The humble detective novel is exhumed, deconstructed, and reconstructed by Thomas Pynchon - not recommended for those who like detective novels, in the generally accepted sense, but a strangely appropriate form for the Pynchon modus operandi.
An obsessive and labyrinthine style, conspiracies and esoterica, an intimation of great and subterranean powers at work, with so many multiple levels of frantic activity the text resembles an archaeological dig more than a book.
A clue perhaps is contained in the title of the novel.
"Inherent vice" is a maritime term for goods rendered uninsurable from unacceptable risk, because of factors in the nature or quality of the goods themselves.
"Doc" Sportello is the hazed-out flatfoot, equal parts Jeffrey Lebowski and Philip Marlowe, stranded in time on Gordita Beach on the wrong side of the '60s.
On the trail of a missing magnate, Sportello travels deep into the fading afterglow of the flatlined Love Revolution.
From the surfside stoner cafes to the wrong end of Vegas, Pynchon's luminously fantastic characters - Trillium Fortnight, Dr Buddy Tubeside and "El Drano" among them - are denizens populating a mythical California of the mind where conversation hinges on the lost continent of Lemuria, surf rock crackles from the car radio and rumours circulate of a sinister force known as the "Golden Fang".
Sportello's quest is soon subsumed into rapidly breeding subplots of fiendish intricacy that derail any sense of forward momentum.
Rather than advancing in linear time, the narrative seems to implode under its own weight.
As "Doc" Sportello drives off into the sea mist, many readers will still be left, lost and wandering in the fog.
Yet among the compulsive wisecracking and convolutions, Pynchon conjures vibrant and haunting music that remains etched in the memory: "The leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvred light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight."
- Victor Billot is editor of the Maritime Union magazine.