Inherent Vice is a book about the sixties and how eerily it can resemble the America of today. Thomas Pynchon is known in american literature as a writer of complicated, long books, with even more complicated prose(before this book i had only read The Crying of Lot 49, his shortest book at 130 so pages that is still relatively a hard read). In this book we find that same quirky and elongated paragraphs, and the same sense of humor and general paranoia that I found in The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon can make connections with most readers by writing about a beloved era, the 60's and 70's and that makes this perhaps an accesible book. Doc Sportello, the main character and PI of the story, lives in a constant cannabis-induced hazed that doesn't help at all when his ex-girlfriend Shasta asks him to help her find her millionaire boyfriend, from then on the story is full of crazy ass characters and lots of "groovy" talk, dig?
Allusions of every type (music, film, literary) are found sprinkled all over the book, (Rocio Durcal and Tom Jobim being the ones I felt more than pleased and surprised by)as well as obvious references to the american detective fiction tradition. Pynchon's take on the detective story is all his own, the plot still as hard to follow as most works of this kind(well theres a lot of weed in the book, so its understandably so)and having Doc solve problems by recollecting epic acid trip hallucinatory facts can be either awesome (to me) or very silly. The lengthy landscape descriptions can also be seen as a tribute to this venerable genre. But is the book good? Yes. Does the book has it's draggy parts? Yes, and thats it's only defect, because in its own way, the book illustrates perfectly the deception and dissapointment of those people who lived in the hippy era and suddenly are faced with the Manson murders, and even more, with the end of "free love" and all that that entails.
On a more personal view of this book, Doc as a character is incredibly easy to sympathize with. He smokes kools, he constantly smokes not shitty weed, but "righteous" weed, eats food all the time, is strangely romantic (though pynchon's sex scenes where nothing more that a beautiful set up and then the dissapointing "they started fucking" or "they fucked"). The dialogue is entertaining, but as a man of the 2000's it was hard for me to able to tell if the exaggerated sixties speak was realistic or not, nevertheless as I said, the dialogue was smart and funny.
So how does this book reflect the America of today? Paranoia, A more and more relaxed "moral" stance on drugs, promiscuity, and the reality of the internet (something that he touched upon towards the end of the book but in a very strong manner, by suggesting the use of technology to not divide, but unite humanity)are things that should resonate to anybody living in the USA of today. The "haze" that Doc is always in can be very easy to parallel with the perpetual "lost" status of man (for good or for worse). Though this points of reflexion come into mind through the reading of the book, the book never focuses on these, succesfully giving the book an "after the reading" depth that I thought wasn't there at first. Pynchon fascinates because though an old soul (72 says faithful wiki)he seems to be very much in touch with the world around him, and his encyclopaedic references show him to be indeed a well rounded man's man. Inherent Vice is the testament of a man who can still have fun writing a book and majestically shares this fun with his readers.
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