'Inherent Vice': Thomas Pynchon's edge softens in this tale of 1970s L.A.

"Inherent Vice"

by Thomas Pynchon

Penguin Press, 369 pp., $27.95

Who is V.? What is the Tristero? Why do Tyrone Slothrop's sexual organs predict the approach of V-2 rockets?

Mysteries have often fueled Thomas Pynchon's plots, so it's logical that he's finally found his way to the private-eye novel. "Inherent Vice" is set in Los Angeles in 1970 and stars a diminutive hippie P.I. named Larry "Doc" Sportello, who stays blitzed on enough marijuana to paralyze Cheech and Chong. Philip Marlowe meets Mr. Natural.

"Inherent Vice" may in fact be Pynchon's funniest book, which is saying something. It's also his most relentlessly, even defiantly pop. Where "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966) uses Renaissance tragedy and the second law of thermodynamics as points of reference, and "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) and "Against the Day" (2006) are stoked with physics and history, you need some basic grounding in "Gilligan's Island" and '60s surf rock to make sense of "Inherent Vice."

And even with an advanced degree in 20th-century fluff, you could find yourself bewildered. The convoluted plot begins with the disappearance of a real-estate magnate and his girlfriend, who happens to be an ex-girlfriend (or, in the novel's parlance, an ex-old lady) of Doc's. He picks up their traces in classic Raymond Chandler fashion: by questioning what seems like 2,000 characters from every walk of L.A. life.

Losing the plot

Mysteries are complicated; according to one well-known story, Chandler himself lost the thread of "The Big Sleep." It would take more paper to chart the course of "Inherent Vice" than I had around while reading it. Then again, I had to take it on faith the first time I tackled "Gravity's Rainbow" that the literary acid trip I had embarked on made any sense. (It made a lot more the second time through.)

Pynchon's overarching theme is clear, though, and it has remained consistent: the obscene injustice of a world that is separated into haves and have-nots. His worldview, like his goofy-to-the-point-of-puerile humor, is very much a product of the '60s, an era he pays tribute to with his favorite emotion, regret.

A decade before the Reagan Revolution, Doc senses that "the Psychedelic '60s, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness ... easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good."

Manson trials

"Inherent Vice" is set at the very moment the dream corroded — just before the start of the Manson trials. The hippie ethos that had felt so groovy before the Cielo Drive murders is looking increasingly creepy, and fear, as one character explains it, has invaded the city:

"It spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what's bleeding, but they don't find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other."

All of which suggests a cold, dark novel. But as it happens, "Inherent Vice" is Pynchon's sunniest book. He may not have lost his pessimism, but the lethal intensity of the novels he was writing in his 20s and 30s, when his own future was still uncertain, has disappeared.

And that's a problem. For all the corruption and violence and evil that Doc turns up along the way, it never feels like very much is really at stake. The book begins to seem long.

Pynchon is now in his early 70s. (Hard as it is to believe, he's only four years younger than Philip Roth.) He doesn't write like a man of advanced years, though; he is still our stoned comic bard of paranoia and despair. But it must be getting hard for him to hold onto his pessimism. It's one thing to believe there's no hope and another — when you've spent your life doing what you love and you've conquered the world — to feel it on your skin.