The Big Lebowski, Bored to Death, The Savage Detectives, Inherent Vice; pot and detectives go together like, well, pot and buffet-style meals? Pot and sex? Pot goes with a lot of things, I guess. The altered detective genre can trace its lineage back to harder and heavier days—Sherlock Holmes and his opiates—but marijuana is funnier and less troubling than heroin.Inherent Vice as a book is propulsive and fascinating, though at times its genre and stereotype nods are so thick that they go beyond satire, beyond caricature into what seems like laziness. I've only previously read the Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, and compared to that this was more of a boilerplate story; I wasn't lost or confused or made to feel stupid. In common the books share a sense of conspiracy, and the claustrophobia that comes from all the coincidental connections that proliferate like knapweed. I bought this book shortly after it was published, but it got lost in the to-read pile shuffle until the Paul Thomas Anderson film adaptation's release date started breathing down my neck. I'm able to experience a film as a film even if I've read the source material, but I'm unable to knock a movie out of my brainpan and read a book with an uncorrupted imagination if I've recently seen it adapted onscreen. It was especially urgent here because Anderson is one of the once-huge but currently ever-dwindling list of American filmmakers whose approach to image and sound really floats my boat, and I will be seeing it on the big screen as soon as I can. As for the book, which is really all a book review on a book review web site should concern itself with, right(?), I've read that most Pynchon nuts consider this minor Pynchon, along with the only other Pynchon book I've read, The Crying of Lot 49, but I'm of the opinion that the heavy postmodern (or are we calling them post-postmodernists now?) novelists' minor works are the best gateway drugs to the full experience (and maybe the best choices for movie adaptations). Like Lot 49, this is a relatively slender comic detective novel about counterculture and drugs and paranoia where the resolution of the mystery is beside the point. I take Inherent Vice to be about the death of the 1960s and its paranoid transition to the 1970s, and how the dark elements that took down the hippie dream were always there from the beginning, but it's also a book where small gestures of kindness end up mattering a great deal in their own small ways. Maybe it's minor Pynchon, but I had a great time reading it.
What do You think about Inherent Vice (2009)?
A bizarre, psychedelic mind-f**k that is a humorous and despairing tale about the death of the 60's.
—hamsonweaver
This book went no where on CD and I did not finish it.
—psikick
