If there are still literary events in the 21st century that reach the immortal levels of the past, the publication of a new Thomas Pynchon novel this last summer is about as close as we're going to get.
The fact that many readers quite possibly have never heard the name before –– Pynchon is a notorious recluse who has spent his entire life avoiding publicity as much as possible, and usually writes extremely dense, lengthy and challenging works –– could make an assertion like that sound ridiculously exaggerated. But to many, Pynchon is the last remaining American novelist who carries the torch passed on from the Lost Generation, to the Beat Generation, to whatever remains of our nation's literary counterculture.
This time he's released a gaudy little beach novel about idealists facing the collapse of the 60's, entitled Inherent Vice.
At 369 pages (his shortest and most accessible full novel yet,) the story is centered around an increasingly complex and cheesy mystery, involving a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer, which mostly serves as a vehicle to introduce a cast of surfers, seekers, stoners, con artists, and anyone else causing trouble around Gordita Beach in 1969.
So, you may ask, does the world really need another hippie drama? The answer is that with Pynchon, it's never about his choice of interests so much as the things he does with them, the way he can overflow and re-engineer your mental image of what the universe is. Even the death of a dream can be fresh and sensual. And for a story that's admittedly stranded in its own time and place, it does a world-class job of bringing every last arc of wave, word of regional lingo, clink of foggy tavern glass and bizarre fluke of California weather to life.
The protagonist is a struggling freelance detective known as Doc Sportello, who seems to drift through his days without much of a care for the world outside of his psychedelic exile in his solitary little spot by the beach. Pynchon's protagonists all seem to have that sort of casually alone and distant quality about them; they invent their own missions in life but seem to miss out on a lot as they struggle with their own unrequited lust for self-knowledge.
But the big question about this book is whether or not, for the first time in Pynchon's career, he wrote something that didn't even really try to be serious or intelligent. It becomes apparent within the first couple chapters that this book is a big joke, but is it an intentionally absurd and mindless joke, or something more? In any case, he's given the entire literary establishment something that feels so weird to analyze that the critics are forced to just give in to the sheer superficiality of it.
Inherent Vice is, first and foremost, a beach novel. Everything about its presentation is hokey, neon and chill. It's not meant to be put on a pedestal or combed for solemn enigmas.
The biggest single thing this book has going for it, in spite of its quirks, is just that it's outrageously, painfully witty. Pynchon never passes up a chance to mercilessly mock his own kind, whether recalling their use of Ouija boards to ask where to score drugs, or their creative lies to themselves that their dead friends just took secret vacations to catch better surf. There are long stretches of the book where every page has something so funny you almost want to stop reading and just think about how funny it is.
This is most definitely the first noteable literary work to come with a corresponding video trailer (mysteriously narrated by the recluse himself) and surf rock soundtrack. (It's all posted on the amazon.com product info page.)
This could just be an overworked writer's dessert, after a lifetime of crafting vast historical monuments that always seemed ironically difficult in comparison to his free spirit. It's clear he wrote this one for fun, for himself, for his generation, and quite possibly for a quick buck.
Underground Icon pens grooviest novel yet
Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Updated: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 03:11
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