I'm sure it's me, but I just couldn't stay with this book. I got distracted and read 2 or 3 books while still in this one. Odd, because it's the kind of book I had expected to like -- smart, private eye, etc. I'm going to read it again in a couple years to see if it has the same effect. ( )

Decent read, but to be honest also a bit disappointing. I expected more of Pynchon. ( )

...and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness... how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

Pynchon's funniest and I think most accessible book. But it's driven by the same themes as his others — the animus of the Elect toward the Preterite, the entrenchment and corrupting essence of power, and the everyday instances of grace and humor that constitute a disorganized resistance. Pynchon's lens in IV is the "long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq's neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates": colonizations and usurpations and repossession and redevelopment. Doc navigates these disputed spaces in a haze of marijuanasmoke, the ultimate stoner P.I., trusting to intuition and happenstance to make some kind of sense out of the chaos.

Maybe it's because I've seen the movie four or five times since I first read this, but it actually mostly made sense this time around. Having some idea at least what was going on, I was able to chill and absorb the warmth of the writing, the radiant affection the novel has for its setting, mingled with longing for what might be and might have been. Lemuria symbolizes this lost Pacific Eden, dormant under the water like the lagan, the contraband submerged for later retrieval by the schooner Golden Fang and other dubious vessels. Sortilège is Lemuria's chief channeler:

"I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it's all this rain, but we're starting to have the same dreams. We can't find a way to return to Lemuria, so it's returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean — 'hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain't it..."
"It talked to you guys?"
"I don't know. It isn't just a place."

But, thinks Doc to himself later,

What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they'd been exiled from too long ago to remember.

Sprinkled in, too, are ironically and characteristically Pynchonian foreshadowings, as Aunt Reet the realtor prophecies realtor.com in an early scene, and Fritz futzes with the nascent ARPAnet in aid of Doc's investigations ("...any excuse to feel like I'm surfin the wave of the future here..."). But Doc can see what's up: "so when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz? [...] Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?" Wolfmann's Channel View Estates are well named, honoring the "toobfreex" Doc meets in a Vegas motel and presaging, too, YouTube's ubiquity.

Like all great L.A. stories, IV is full of weather too, the Santa Anas messing with the dope-addled denizens of Gordita Beach like so:

Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered 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...

Palms beating together, louvered light, a downpour — ingredients sufficient on their own for me to love a book. ( )

Shaggy dog noir, magical realist and postmodern, along with a healthy dose of SoCal 70s burnout culture. Charles Manson is referenced quite a bit, along with a panoply of musical allusions, both real and made-up. Later Pynchon is fun to read, mainly because he has dropped a lot of his po-faced experimentalism and just lets his overactive brain take over. It all can be a bit confusing (or trippy) as the Inherent Vice has an extensive cast list, and the plot structure reads as a lot of stoned digressions. The reader learns, however, not to underestimate the druggy losers on the fringes of society, and not overestimate the straight men who are supposedly in charge. ( )

Like Chandler on LSD. Groovy. ( )

This was the first Pynchon I've ever read, and it leaves me wanting to read more. Occasionally hilarious, frequently wacky. At several odd points in the book it seemed as if the fabric of reality was giving way to the main character's hallucinations (and perhaps it did?) which added an undertone of the absurd and uncanny to the book. ( )

Inherent Vice is Pynchon at his most accessible. It's about a private detective living in the L.A. of 1970. It's just a fun read, an indulgence of imagination and reading pleasure. It's the novelistic equivalent of a Tarantino film, except that Tarantino pays more attention to female characters.

I plucked it off the shelf when I saw that Paul Thomas Anderson has made a movie adaptation. I'm glad I picked it up. The recent Pynchon novels (Against the Day, Bleeding Edge, and this one) have been stacking up on the shelf, and it was delightful to get back into his paranoid world. His vision resonates with the privacy concerns of the 2010s.

Read it if you liked The Crying of Lot 49. It's also a sort of novelistic cousin of Vineland.

Now I just can't wait for the movie! ( )

This must be the most stoned book of all time

Ok, I'd probably read Pynchon's to-do list & find it somehow interesting - based on how much I loved "Gravity's Rainbow", "Mason & Dixon", & "Against the Day". The jacket cover blurb says "In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre".. UH?! Ok, Pynchon didn't write that so let's blame the publicist. What I'm getting at here is that any new Pynchon bk is like water to my internal desert, BUT.. I was lucky to find a used 1st edition hardback of this in a local bkstore whose owners might not even know who Pynchon IS - this, in the yr it was published. Score! I met a teacher recently who didn't know Pynchon & THAT shocked me!

HOWEVER, this is about as far from "working in an unaccustomed genre" as Pynchon can get. Shit! It's the 1st time I've read a Pynchon where I was reminded of Philip K. Dick & Rudy Rucker (maybe even Richard Brautigan), where I was reminded of the movie "The Big Lebowski" & where I wondered whether Pynchon hadn't written it wondering why the fuck nobody's made a movie out of any of his bks yet (have they?). It was like his "Vineland" in the sense that there's the interplay between cops & snitches, it was like most Pynchon bks w/ its complex intrigue, it was like "The Crying of Lot 49" w/ its social milieu. Shit, it was like Pynchon turning his own works into a Pynchon genre.

NONETHELESS, I'm delighted he wrote it! EVEN THOUGH I PREFER THE EPICS THAT AREN'T SO EASILY CLASSIFIABLE. After all, this is classic pulp crime fiction updated from the '30s & '40s to the end of the '60s. The PI smokes pot & takes LSD instead of drinking himself to near death & getting slipped Mickeys in the form of pills. PCP? Maybe. Pills? Nah.. Pynchon is very deliberately updating the genre here (just as some movies have done before him) & that, alone, is enuf to make Pynchon-&-pulp enthusiasts delighted.

The ultimate relief here is that Pynchon isn't dead yet. When he stops writing bks there'll be a sadness - not just the sadness that he's dead, but also the sadness that we, his readers, won't have the thrill of reading a new one! ( )

A smart and funny book that examines the cultural sea change transpiring in the early '70s through the lens of a hard-boiled detective story (albeit a Lebowski-esque pot-fueled PI). Probably worth a second read to better understand the way in which Pynchon is using motifs and themes of fog, drug trips, lost civilizations, and reincarnation/undeath among others to represent the waves and interplay of countercultural revolution and reactionary backlash. If you liked Vineland, this book mines similar territory but from the vantage point of LA and the year 1970.

Half the fun of the book is the vivid and oft-absurd way Pynchon portrays the strange and crazy world of surfers, potheads, musicians, LAPD, and ex-cons that populate his novel. ( )

I can now say I've finished a Pynchon, my two previous efforts stalled 2/3rds way in (Vineland) and page 10 (Gravity's Rainbow).Granted it's Pynchon-lite and has as much in common with Raymond Chandler as his previous work. Nevertheless his obsession with the '60s is still there. I was able to follow the plot (a surprise!) though it careened around a bit. He has a whip-smart ability to render exchanges aswell as being as streetwise as, say, James Ellroy. Doubtless some will miss the erudition but it is chock-full of pop culture references (about half of which I get). His ideal reader though is probably an American of 60-plus years. Nonetheless, I will try him again with something else. ( )

Normally I hate loopy comparisons, but the only way I can describe this book is that it's the hardboiled detective noir of The Maltese Falcon plus the absurd goofiness of The Big Lebowski plus the copious drug use of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Pynchon is always stereotyped as a Difficult Author who writes Long and Complicated Literature, but one thing I've always loved about him is just how funny he is, even when he's writing about medieval postal conspiracies (The Crying of Lot 49), impossibly weird V2 rocket cartels (Gravity's Rainbow), or 18th century surveying controversies (Mason & Dixon). Inherent Vice is a sort of parody of detective fiction - I haven't read that much of the classic 30s-era detective stuff, but Pynchon hilariously spoofs the endless double-crosses and plot twists of the whodunit genre by wrapping the predictably unpredictable left turns in a very funny nostalgia trip for the late-60s/early-70s California surfer scene that's as much about the constantly high main character and his stoner buddies as it is about the murder mystery they're trying to solve, escape, or just ignore when the late-night cartoon marathons hit the airwaves. This might be the most normal (i.e., least insane) book he's ever written, but it was also one of the most immediately satisfying. ( )

Although the rear cover of the book says that Pynchon's working here in an unaccustomed genre, it felt like pretty familiar territory to me: People with funny names become embroiled in criss-crossing hijinks, often at odds with the authorities. Also: drugs (guess I'd call the unaccustomed genre here "stoner noir"). It was an ok book, better in the last 100 pages than elsewhere. The thing I think I've finally put together about Pynchon is that it's hard for me to get in the heads of any of his characters, and without that access, it's hard for me to feel like I have much of a stake in their plights, which tends to make his books hard for me to really engage with. There's plenty of humor here, and a handful of moments of real humanity, but mostly it reads like Pynchon riffing on The Big Lebowski. ( )

I've got interested in Pynchon after watching P. T. Anderson's adaptation of this novel, so I shyly and carefully entered his world with his Bleeding Edge (2013) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1965, Croatian translation), thus got a bit familiar with his style and way of constructing plots.

In my opinion this crazy, psychedelic and hallucinogenic world he built is on par with those in his two other novels. This time revolving around a private head, Doc Sportello, trying to unwind the mystery of a missing construction magnate, Mickey Wolfmann, that his ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay, asked him to find. In this investigation many other mysteries and characters emerge, gradually twisting the plot and disorienting the reader. Throughout the story Doc, and also the reader, gets more and more sure in the presence of the invisible and dark forces that pull the strings around our main and other characters, which is one of the recurring motives in Bleeding Edge and Lot 49.
On the surface this works as a great detective story with it's memorable characters set in the late 60's Los Angeles. The twingling story keeps the reader engaged, while also disorienting him, with every chapter bringing front another mystery that gets untangled as the book gets closer to the end. And it works on this level as good as it gets.
On the other hand, under the surface this is a great testimony and an analysis of a lost American culture, the creeping appearance of neoliberalism and the fascist and bullying reign of the USAs establishment leaders, in this case those of republicans R. Nixon and R. Reagan.

The only thing I didn't like in some instances is the treatment of some of the female characters, whereas they often seem to be victims of some really aggressive sexual assaults.
The book demands a lot of focus, and I can't wait to read it again, this time in English.

By the way, there's a good read on the subject of the movie and the book on this link: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/inherent-vice-review-counterculture

Enjoy. ( )

At the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy 70’s funny serious meta-noir, is a mystery greater than the plot presented. As revealed by Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (wonderful screenplay by Robert Towne) and Raymond Chandler’s every lit only by streetlight foray into Los Angeles and its environs, there is a river of turpitude flowing beneath the shiny hard gloss of Southern California. Whereas the earlier works dealt with that river seeping up through the cracks into the lives of individuals, Pynchon’s INHERENCT VICE places his plot just after a moment where such a crack became a seismic fault line—Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders. Barely addressed during the actual novel, this event was personal to Los Angeles in a way that the other death knells of sixties idealism were not. The clinical savagery of the murders by the blindly obedient seemingly harmless followers of a charismatic madman, stunned and horrified the public beyond startled head shaking and dismay. The murders crept down into the core of who we thought we were and many never quite saw the world the same again. (Can we trust authority to protect us—does authority even care?) Onto this unsettled plain, come the quirky goofballs and malevolent forces of Pynchon’s world. A music mogul’s disappearance seems to be the trigger of events, but as Pynchon unfolds his tale gradually and gracefully you realize that all the events of his story are just aftermath. We are only playing catch up to events that unfold without our knowledge and beyond our power and will likely escape our understanding when we come upon them. Pynchon also brings in one of his favorite recurring themes, identity. There are people undercover, people finding out who they are or were, people leading double lives and people who are so slightly connected to the world that they may be said to not to exist at all. Doc Sportello, Pynchon’s names are always marvelous, the PI that leads the reader through the tale is easy to dismiss as a drugged out hippie but he will grow in your esteem and affection while the music mogul at the center of the mystery does a character 180….and then another. He remains almost little more than a shadow figure that the other characters try to mold into the image they want to see. In the midst of this are the things we choose to distract ourselves with sex, drugs, rock n’ roll and television and munchies. Mix in Pynchon’s usual array of unusual characters who seldom do quite what you expect them to do for reasons you won’t see coming and what I have presented as a heavy and ominous tome reads more like an ingenious PI story rolled up in a pothead’s lark. The humor is often sly, sometimes bawdy and lewd but the trip always rewarding. An amusing romp amidst the tombstones of our culture. ( )

A pesar de las críticas que ha recibido esta novela por parte de críticos medio snobs, Inherent vice me pareció un libro genial. Divertido, complejo, coloquial, laberíntico. ( )

It is no great surprise when this pothead noir changes location from coastal southern California to Las Vegas, Correct, think [b:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas|7745|Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas|Hunter S. Thompson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1333056001s/7745.jpg|1309111]. Inherant Vice is not bound by similar streams of endless paraphernalia but rather takes the vantage point that Thompson employed, looking back from the dark hues of Nixonia across the ruins of Altamont to the legacy of Great Promise. Pynchon layers the atmosphere with puns, free love and a high tide of chemical paranoia. Doc, his protagonist, is on the cusp of a sinister conspiracy but unfortunately falls asleep or burns one at moments of elucidation. The birth of the internet assists, but requires an enormous cost. The bliss of free radio is trumpeted. Pop music does tend to dominate the narrative. Surf rock reigns here. This is a rollicking good time but one which warns in our own age of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
( )

This was my first Pynchon novel, and it will probably be my last. He's a fine writer, but as another reviewer put it, his stuff is "dick lit". Maybe if I had tried reading him when I was younger I would have been more impressed.... ( )

I am sad to say I found myself completely annoyed by this one. I made it to the end and remember next to nothing because I guess I didn't care at all. ( )

“. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire . . .” ( )

It's a fun premise—hardboiled noir set in the psychedelic beach-stoner California of the early 70s—but it ends up being pretty thin stuff, thinner than, for instance, the mere two hours of The Big Lebowski. The cultural references and the winky nods to the inevitable future (did you know that one day we'd have the Internet?) feel overresearched, bordering on broad satire. That said, the character of Doc Sportello is fun and memorable. As a Rockford-style TV show, this might have worked better. ( )

A fun, fast read for Pynchon. ( )

Pyhchon's riff on LA noir features a 70's setting, a hippie pothead detective, and enough weird conspiracies and coincidences to delight even the nerdiest of us. Funny and profane in places, and I'm still not exactly sure what happened, which is kind of the point. ( )

Fuzzy. I don't like detective stories unless they're brutally violent or horrible. This was no exception, definitely not for me. Read this on a holiday and it made the flight seem three times longer (and it was a long flight to begin with). Oh, luckily I haven't seen the movie. ( )

Imagine Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler smoking a lot of 60's era Hawaiian or Mexican pot and then writing a Coen Brothers movie. That sort of touches on what it is like to read Inherent Vice. There are noir elements and plenty of psychedelia in what is at its core a detective novel set in 1960's era Los Angeles. The back beat of the novel involves one imagining a surf soundtrack. I guess you could add Tarantino's ear for good soundtrack music to the story. But I digress....

The main character is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a perpetually pot smoking private eye who is trying to figure out what is going on with the mysterious jazz/surf musician Coy Harlingen; who killed an ex-con named Charlock and where his girlfriend has disappeared to with an enigmatic developer named Mickey Wolfmann.

Into the mix are dumped a couple of Dr. Feelgood types, some bent cops, some neo-Nazi's and some mobsters. And just for fun? Something or someone or many one's put together calling themselves the Golden Fang.

The story is very non-linear and very surreal which for some, will be a turn off. I didn't find it detracted from the story at all but it certainly forces the reader to concentrate more in order to follow the story. There is an extensive list of characters, many with very sixties era names (Amethyst, Japonica, Jade to name a few) and many of these also sport nicknames that are used interchangeably. This adds a challenging element for the reader.

The story bobs and weaves around the Los Angeles and Orange County areas with a quick trip to Las Vegas in the middle just to keep things interesting. There is heroin smuggling, shade real estate developments, prostitution, dentistry and legal and illegal gambling activities that Doc must sort out in order to figure out how and where all the players fit and secure his friends and his own future.

I enjoyed it and I took my time reading it. This is not something to jump into and read quickly. It is not straight forward story telling so Pynchon is probably a required taste. A taste worth acquiring but not for everyone. For me though....a solid four stars and motivation to try some more Pynchon. ( )