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    Inherent Vice
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    Inherent Vice
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    Inherent Vice
    Audiobook14 hours

    Inherent Vice

    Written by Thomas Pynchon

    Narrated by Ron McLarty

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon- private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog

    It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

    In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 4, 2009
    ISBN9781101079409
    Unavailable
    Inherent Vice

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    Reviews for Inherent Vice

    3.5/5

    681 ratings46 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A fun, fast read for Pynchon.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      I certainly think it succeeds at what it sets out to do, but I do not find what it sets out to do particularly interesting. But the writing is great and it is often very funny. My first Pynchon; I will read more.
    • 4/5
      A brightly colored read about a great place and time. Early 70's LA must have been a blast. Doc could have been a new version of Marlowe but Pynchon isn't Chandler. To many characters and not enough on Doc. And when he did I found it over done. But none the less an ok read that could have been tightened up. But it does make me want to read one of his more famous books.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      Awful book. Couldn't get beyond the first chapter. An embarrassingly awful writer.
    • 2/5
      I'm calling this read, even though I'm only 10% done (according to Kindle). I feel like I'm missing something. Dense is one way to describe the writing, inaccessible and nonsensical is another way. If I'm going to work this hard at a book, I need to give more of a shit about the characters and storyline. I just don't care enough to push though.
    • 5/5
      I forget where I read it, but I remember somebody once remarking on how all detective novels are really existential journeys. With that in mind, Pynchon has managed to fashion an ultimate existential detective novel. I've noticed some reviews dismissing Inherent Vice because of the supposed lack of tension caused by the erratic and multifaceted "mystery" that nearly collapses in on itself with countless coincidences and interweaving story-lines, but perhaps that's just because they've taken Pynchon's latest novel on its face value as just a detective novel, because it is almost certain that this was done on purpose. Traditional detective novels will include 'red herrings' every so often to distract the reader from the truth; in the case of Inherent Vice, the detective story is a red herring in itself, as the underlying mystery is the grand mystery that the hippie counterculture found itself overwhelmed with and eventually defeated by, that ultimate mystery of universal truth, the existential quandary of "Why?" The answer, of course, is in the title. Inherent Vice is a term that refers to a defect that causes it to deteriorate due to the fundamental instability of its components as a whole. In insurance claims this usually refers to an object, and in the novel it is used to describe Doc's ex-old-lady, but in the grand scheme of things it is a term that encompasses not just relationships, but society, culture, and even life itself. Doc's hippie detective can perhaps be seen to symbolize that basic yearning at the heart of the social/spiritual/psychological/pharmaceutical revolution that drove the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and how all of the hallucinatory madness came not from a drug-fueled paranoia as much as it did from the insanity that slowly encompasses you when you try to find a reason for the way things are, or to fix something that is broken by design.Of course, you shouldn't take all of this too seriously, but if you can accept that this isn't a 'traditional' detective story, yet acknowledge that there is a method to Pynchon's madness, then at least you'll be able to relax a bit and enjoy the ride.
    • 4/5
      Caveat: I read this while recovering from oral surgery, doped out on codeine. So I was probably easier on it than I would otherwise be.

      Most people probably know by now that this is 'Pynchon-lite' or some such thing. It was reviewed in Entertainment Weekly, for god's sake. And, in my addled state, I decided this is a good thing. Like Pynchon was bridging the gap between himself circa Gravity's Rainbow and television cop shows. This is good because with IV you get what you get from the better cop shows - a few laughs, tension and mystery - with what you get from the better novels - a filtering of the world through one story, although the boundaries around the 'one' story here are pretty fuzzy.

      I don't think that it's a parody of private investigator books, or at least there's no evidence of that. In fact, far from broad comedy, it's quite moving. Anyone who's ever been part of any counter-culture and thought about that counter-culture will recognize their thoughts in this book. The Big Bad Copper turns out to be as put upon and oppressed as the Righteous Hippie. The familiar point being: the counter-culture, and those fighting it, are always just flies on the ass of the elephant that is capitalism. The great thing about Inherent Vice is that it dramatizes this fact.

      Good old Hippy Doc comes to see that he's much the same as the Cop, and that neither of them are even remotely close to being the Man, who (hilariously) lives in a gated community inside another gated community. The Cop might live a bit closer to this center of power, but there are just as many gates between him and the Man as there are between the Hippy and the Man. Everything outside that larger gated community counts the same: for nothing. In this book, unlike a lot of similar books from the last 50 years, the paranoia turns out to be dead-on, the conspiracy really is there. But it doesn't give a shit about you, it's not trying to keep you down. It doesn't have to, because, as the final interview between Doc and the Man makes clear, you need the conspiracy to survive. Depressing. The novel's not as depressing as this makes it seem though. I think. The ending's not exactly definitive either way.

      ps: Given this impressively drawn picture of the world, I'm glad I didn't read the Bookforum review before the novel. The reviewer seems to think the whole book is about how we can't know anything, how memory is unreliable, and how people have stopped reading. There really are bigger fish to fry. If only literary critics would wake up to the smell.
    • 5/5
      I should have read the book first before I watched the movie.
    • 5/5
      Wow. This is a really, really funny book, filled with craziness. Doc Sportello is great and the plot jumps around and has many facets. I enjoyed it because it was so hectic.
    • 4/5
      A bit gonzo for my taste, the story caromed along, ever entertainingly, from one confusing drug-addled incident to the next. The sudden slow-down at the end, the wide-angle shot of Los Angeles blanketed in fog, Doc stuck in slow moving traffic with only a pair of tail lights in front of him for company while he does a great pensive, hard boiled reverie of a monologue - this last, short little scene really makes it for me. A wonderful curtain.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      This book drops you into the life of a private investigator named Doc who lives in Gordita Beach, in southern California. The book is written as though it is one in a series, referencing events that happened in the past and other cases Doc has worked on. I like that Pynchon has picked of these markers of the genre in which he is writing.
      It is the very beginning of the 70s and Doc is a hippie. He is not the kind of hippie who goes on war protests or hides out with Black Panthers, but instead is what was probably the much more common type of hippie that smokes a lot of pot and finds himself friends with people who believe that a mythic island is going to rise out of the water off the coast or who send him on an acid trip in order to piece together the clues he has floating around in his brain. He is hired to fight a disappeared real estate mogul which links into a number of different conspiracies which were fun to thread together.
      At times I felt like I was reading Hunter S. Thompson...some of the same random, driving through the night running into random characters and taking various substances kind of vibe. Although there is more of a plot than the standard Hunter S. Thompson and, it also seems, a different kind of point. Although Doc is very much of the time in which he is living, there are significant clues that the author is commenting on the times from the future. The Manson murders weave throughout the book as background and signal the darker side of the hippie culture which is to turn even worse as the 70s progress. One of Doc's associates has found out how to log into an early version of the internet and forecasts a time when we will all be under constant surveillance.
      I really enjoyed this book. I would say, however, that if you are super hung up on plot this might not be the book for you. It does have an interesting plot but it takes almost too much concentration to follow it. It is better just to appreciate the vibes that are being sent out by this book and the commentary that is offered on the era in which it takes place and our own era.
    • 5/5
      “. . . 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 . . .”
    • 4/5
      Listen: if I wanted to reread Gravity’s Rainbow, I would reread Gravity’s Rainbow. I may start pulling my hair out if I keep reading (maybe I should stop reading) reviews asking the ridiculous question: And maybe perhaps, T.P. could explain what possessed him to write a cheesy noire novel? As best I can remember, noire is a perfectly acceptable category of literature/film. Doyle, Hitchcock, Chandler, these are not pulp, folks. The other complaint is that Doc Sportello is a big old, Lebowski-like stoner, prone to hippie slang and psychedelic ramblings. For some reason this offends some Pynchon fans but the offense is lost on me.Well, maybe I’ve figured it out. See, here’s the thing: these concepts are so completely and utterly Pynchon that perhaps, the irony is lost on his normal readers. They are too busy telling people that they are offended by pot (because no drug has ever so much as reared its fuzzy head in a Pynchon novel before?) and cheesed out by the plot (also, something that has, regardless of contrary claims, appeared before) that they can’t see Inherent Vice for what it is: perfect. Pynchon has always created strange story lines with uncountable characters and writing that resembles a bad (or good depending on which half of the sentence you’re reading) trip.If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’ll tell you now: I enjoyed Inherent Vice. The writing is hilarious in the (gasp) usually Pynchon style. While, I can’t make you like the alleged Cheech and Chong dialogue “issue” if you aren’t in the mood (and then why, pray tell did you pick up the book having read the synopsis, regardless of writer), I think that actually reading the book, keeping in mind that it is not a beach read will change your mind on the pesky area of detective plot.Now, since the man doesn’t actually believe in public interaction, we’ll never know but I think that the goal in following the noire mold was a simultaneous parody and tribute to the mystery genre. There is a great section where they shoot through Sherlock Holmes’s coke use and debatable existence during which I found myself wondering who on earth people thought wrote this book if not Pynchon.Later in the evening, the two men settle in to a discussion where real cops and PI’s are deemed unneeded as there are already enough running around on the small screen. This is, from where I’m sitting, the “point” of using the noire device that so many people are looking for although, I still maintain that it is not something that needs to be explained if the writing is inherently funny and provocative.As for the other themes, the small surf town is caught between the sleepy sixties and the corporate seventies. Here, watching the beach change seems to be a main focus, the surfers, the shop owners, the very survival, or rather demise, of the town in the changing climate.My favorite part of Pynchon’s stories is the way he writes his characters as clichés and point makers rather than straight people. We are introduced to very Pynchon-like fellows and females ranging (but not limited to, of course) from Shasta, the classic Femme Fatale (hello noire); Bigfoot, the hippie-hating cop; Spike, the hippie-friendly but also hippie-phobic, war-scared Nam vet and St. Flip, a religious surfer (and a religious surfer) “for whom Jesus Christ was not only a personal savior but surfing consultant as well.” (p.99) While I’d like to type up his five-page introduction, I’ll just leave you with this:“Back in the beach pad there was a velvet painting of Jesus riding goofyfoot on a rough-hewn board with outriggers, meant to suggest a crucifix, through surf seldom observed on the Sea of Galilee, though the hardly presented a challenge to Flip’s faith. What was ‘walking on water,’ if it wasn’t Bible talk for surfing? In Australia once, a local surfer, holding the biggest can of beer Flip had ever seen, had even sold him a fragment of the True board.” (p.99)I will make one concession. Doc, himself, was just the leaf in the wind and, here, I think was the main problem for many. Often, as in Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day and V. the story shifts point-of-view multiple times, the main protagonist never really being the complete focus, thus leaving him a little flat. Here, every person is painted through Doc’s personal record. While, in truth, all of the myriad players are there and covered much as they are in any other Pynchon novel, I suppose that this creates a problem if people are looking for someone to tell them that there are still other characters involved in the story even if the book is narrated through one voice.As far as the prose is concerned, I am, quite frankly, lost. As mentioned above, what has, until now, seemed “totally Pynchon” has an explanation. Remember that bit about the squid kidnapping the girl on the beach in Gravity’s Rainbow? Now why wasn’t that described as a bad acid trip, a cheesy device while very similar scenes, clearly drug induced, in Inherent Vice are hung out to dry? Is it that without a motive these things seem cool and intellectual but in the fog of some burnout they are less enticing because they are altered, not academic? Similarly, the genre of mystery, noire or pulp, lends itself to myriad shady characters popping in for no reason at all. I say, hey, that sounds a lot like V. to me. It also sounds like Gravity’s Rainbow and also, a bit like Against the Day. Again, the same question, because it fits, is it inherently bad?I really do think that this is right in line with the other works in Pynchon’s library. It may not pick up to regular incoherent speed until a little further in but it is Pynchon through and through. I don’t think this is going to go down as a beach read unless you don’t read it and instead write your opinion based on the cover art. Of course, you are perfectly welcome to do that, though, if you would like. Pynchon is, after all, into subjectivity.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Read this one and thought it fun and terrifying... it combined the Elmore Leonardesque (Rum Punch aka Jackie Brown) with Pynchonesque ( Gravity Rainbow) into a well crafted book. The movie probably is a great adaptation, as this is Pynchon's strongest storyline. The book is still is not as good as Gravity Rainbow.
    • 4/5
      Thomas Pynchon is a writer who compels the reader to work hard through his books to find a gem at the end of his rainbow. If you want something easy Mr. Pynchon probably is not your cup of tea. But if you are willing to be submerged in a new experience Pynchon is your guide.

      Here Pynchon, our rough guide, takes us to the Los Angeles neighborhood that surrounds LAX. The time is 1969, and the mood is hazy. Our government has us involved in a never ending war with a place called Vietnam. The economy is good not great. The beginning of the internet is here but it will not be released to the public till 1991. Charlie Manson has gotten every suburbanite scared of long haired freaks. There seems to be a quite buzz about. Los Angeles feels like it could blow up into a Technicolor Riot at any moment. Pynchon does an incredible job of lifting up what subterranean currants made Los Angeles glow dim in the 1980’s. This is where we find Doc, a private gum shoe, investigating the disappearance of his girlfriend.

      I really enjoyed this book and think that anyone who likes Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler would find this book a blast. It also could be the book for all of you interested in social history; with a need to find out what caused something to turn from a dream into now a nightmare.

      All people who love Shelley Winters will love this book.

      Inherent Vice is scheduled to become a movie released in 2014.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      Thomas Pynchon is insanely talented but this isn't one of his best works. It's probably one of the easiest ones to follow in terms of plot (though this is relative to his other volumes, not the total canon of all literature ever published or anything) It's set in the late 60s in California and sometimes I wonder if, given the fact that Pynchon is a famous recluse, he's just used to recalling this time period most vividly if he was actually experiencing life amongst other people more frequently. One can't be sure but there seems to be little in the way of point in this novel for me. What's the over-arching take away? The reason behind this work? It seems more like an adventure of a hippie-druggie detective who has just enough brain cells left to make a few discoveries without killing himself along the way.

      The plot is complex involving real estate tycoons, famous cops who are well known actors (again, this is California), people of various socioeconomics who have preferred drugs of choice and seem so loyal to these drugs it's sad that they couldn't find something else to be so passionate about. You see rich housewives, failed actresses trying to get rich, the daughters of the incredibly wealthy, skinheads, surfer musicians, and everything in between...however, this is mainly a character study about Doc Sportello who should be a great deal more nervous about falling into traps when murders are being committed all around him. He takes things as they come and has this over arching it's all going to work out in the end type of sense to him instead.

      Also, Pynchon still doesn't know how to write a sex scene. I feel I should re-iterate this. It makes me concerned for him that he's needed a woman to keep him comfort all these times to remember what it's like..well, at least to help him write about it. OR, more preferably, he could just stick to what he knows and leave the sex scenes out altogether. That would be my preference.


      I'm not sure why PT Anderson felt this novel was so special he should do a film adaptation of it but, seeing as how I respect PT's work, I felt I should read this book to see. I admit I couldn't open the cover for so long because the cover itself made me extremely nauseous. In this case, it would have been okay to have judged the book by the cover. I think Pynchon still shows us an adventurous plot and an interesting character study but only read this one if you've read many of his others and can't get enough and also if you somehow want to read about California in the late 1960s...God knows there just isn't enough literature about that already. #sarcasm

      Memorable quotes:

      pg. 7 "In the real estate business, God knows, few of us are strangers to moral ambiguity. But some of these developers, they make Godzilla look like a conservationist..."

      pg. 22 "Maybe it was all the exotic sensory input that caused Doc to then swoon abruptly and lose an unknown amount of his day."

      pg. 132 "English zombies! look at them, man, American zombies are at least out front about it, tend to stagger when they try to walk anywhere, usually, in third ballet position, and they go, like 'Uunnhh...uunnhh' with that rising and falling tone, whereas English zombies are for the most part quite well spoken, they use long words and they glide everywhere, like, sometimes you don't even see them take steps, it's like they're on ice skates..."

      pg. 171 "This was not a moment he'd been either dreading or hoping for, though now and then somebody would remind him of the ancient American Indian belief that if you save somebody's life, you are responsible for them from then on..."

      pg. 334 "What goes around may come around, but it never ends up in exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be into a whole 'nother song."


    • 2/5
      Enjoyed it for awhile, mainly due to the SoCal culture of the 60s stuff, but it eventually became tedious and hard to read. And the writing itself didn't have much of Pynchon's usual flair.
    • 5/5
      Vintage Pynchon with a strong dose of humor, mockery, unreliability, strangeness and an endless bouquet of magnificent language.
    • 5/5
      Yes, it's a funny one, and you might almost think it's a Pynchon knockoff, but if so, it's just too, too good. What's the point of any novel? He's capturing (a seemingly very personal) moment of time that he seems to mark as the beginning of the death of American freedom (and the freewheeling counterculture of Southern California) and the ascendance the Net, the grid, the all encompassing system that tracks everyone everywhere... it's about how the counterculture got turned into Nike, Converse, Coke, and Pepsi.I think it's his Crying of Lot 49 do-over, and I think it works pretty darn well. You have to get past the plot--admittedly he never ends super well, though this ending is fair enough--and get to the Situation, man....Also, it's all about ZOMES! How can you not love it?
    • 4/5
      Honestly, I'm not sure what I thought of this novel. I enjoyed it, but I'm not really sure what the point was. And maybe that's part of the point - the main characters are so deep in their haze of drugs that they don't really know what's going on for most of the book. The characters are likeable, the dialog is snappy, and some of the situations are hilarious (such as the guy who sees a big television box and therefore assumes that whatever is in the box must be a television, therefore he takes out the crate of heroin and stares at it for hours, entertained by the slow-moving documentary). The whole book is kindof a mood piece - it's a portrait of LA in the '60s, full of hippies, surfers, grumpy cops, and lots and lots and lots of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, with foreboding hints about the sour turn all of this will take in the '70s. The novel is also an amusing spoof on the detective genre. The PI at the center of the action is constantly on a wide range of drugs, and is aware of the effect drugs have on his memory. Sometimes the drugs help him in his detecting: his paranoia leads him to make some crazy but useful connections that his LAPD counterparts would never make. Sometimes the drugs prevent him from seeing the obvious. This is the first Pynchon novel I have read, and I will read more - Pychon's writing is poetic and expressive.I listened to the audiobook version of this. The narrator is fantastic: the voices for all of the characters are perfect, and he even sings all the songs.
    • 4/5
      If you took all the great lines in -The Big Lebowski- and changed them into beautiful philosophical prose about the minutiae of the 60s and early 70's, add in a couple characters too many to make it harder to follow you get -Inherent Vice-. It's hilarious. It's retro-cool. The main character is a stoner PI - he's totally "the Dude" except he has a license.MY GOD this man can write - and he's funny for an old dude. The story might have made more sense if I had read it instead of listened to it on audio but then I would have missed out on the cool funny stoner voices.Must read more Pynchon.
    • 3/5
      A hippie version of a crime noir novel, set in the early 70's. It features a lonely and drug-addled, but still alert and hardnosed, private investigator, and plenty of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Also surfer music, food joints, new age clinics, classic cars, corrupt police, the manifold manifestations of a mysterious criminal organization called the "Golden Fang", a side trip to Las Vegas, the importance of family, foreshadowing the internet, and so forth. A fun read, and you have to really think and pay attention to understand the plot and the jokes. Somewhat against expectations, there is even a denouement, although plenty of loose ends are left untied. The best part of the book is not the plot, rather the nostalgia (OK, I am too young for this, but still) and the atmosphere.It has a LOT of characters. I started writing a list of names of all characters as they appeared no matter how minor, and this came in very handy, as someone mentioned in passing could show up again much later. I was torn between giving this three or four stars, but I recently read also "Gun, with Occasional Music", which is also a variation on the crime noir genre, and that book was a lot more inventive and made more of an impression on me, so I have downgraded this book to three stars. I would definitely recommend it to others, as long as they understand that Thomas Pynchon can be outrageous at times.
    • 4/5
      At first, I was bored, even annoyed by this book. It was just the same boring sixties californian dope-smoking as Vineland. I was not enjoying it at all. But then I realised how funny it was. One of the funniest books I've read in ages, certainly the funniest Pynchon I've read. So I ended up really enjoying IV, and probably would have enjoyed it even more had I bothered to keep track of who all the characters were. Fun.
    • 4/5
      Doc Sportello, anti-establishment, principled doper, was inspired to become a private investigator by watching John Garfield films. Set in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Inherent Vice, is an intelligent, atypical, beach-noir, detective story. It also captures the waning days of a California sub-culture.Although self-admittedly drug addled, Doc is able to track some leads in the case of a missing land developer that was living with Doc’s ex-girlfriend. Doc knows so many people that it’s difficult at times to keep track of the characters, but it all shakes out in the end.