Review of Inherent Vice
I read my first two Pynchon books this year. The Crying of Lot 49 knocked my socks off. Inherent Vice grabbed those socks and ate them. I am sockless and I am converted: Pynchon is my favorite fiction author.
The premise: In 1970, Doc Sportello is a chronically stoned private investigator living in Gordita Beach near Los Angeles. Doc's ex, Shasta, tips him off to a plot to seize the fortune of her boyfriend, Wolfmann, a major real estate developer. Soon after, Shasta and Wolfmann disappear. As Doc investigates, he keeps encountering the Golden Fang, a mysterious group which has its tentacles in everything: real estate, a dentists' guild, a smuggling ring, and more. Doc is never exactly targeted by the Golden Fang, but everywhere he looks, he finds another tentacle, and he can never be sure who's in league with it.
I listened to Inherent Vice as an audiobook. Ron McLarty is an amazing performer. He sounds just like a whacked-out hippie, a cynical cop, a stoned doofus, a hallucinating teenager, and even his narrating voice is perfect for the tone and atmosphere of the story. What's more, he sings all of the songs peppered throughout the novel.
I feel the titular "inherent vice" refers to the 60s counterculture rotting from within and turning on itself, as the Golden Fang profits from all sides. It smuggles and sells the drugs, creating addicts, and it runs the rehab compound where addicts get clean.
The largest difference between Lot 49 and Inherent Vice is that in the former, Oedipa can never be sure if the Trystero conspiracy actually exists, or if she's just growing paranoid while encountering an awful lot of coincidences. The reader is also denied certainty on that point by the novel's cliffhanger ending. On the other hand, in Inherent Vice the conspiracy is definitely real and, in an odd way, bland. The Golden Fang is a corporation with real estate and a megayacht.
Arguably, there isn't any conspiracy at all: the 60s ended, and in the 70s the real estate developers moved in to buy up the beachside areas of the hippie heyday. The remaining hippies, stoners, freaks, and dropouts get by on a mix of nostalgia and drug-addled blindness; they turn on each other and become government informants. Amidst all this, Doc is a good person trying to do what's right without letting the decay of the hippie culture get to him.