08/12/09
Text: Scott Indrisek
It took us a few days to plow through most of Inherent Vice before coming to the sad conclusion: we just don't like the new Thomas Pynchon novel very much. What starts off as a California noir with hip shades of Double Indemnity swiftly degenerates into a heap of cameo characters, crooked cops, white supremacists, shadowy drug cartels, and anything else the author can cram into this trash compactor of a book. Yes, as many critics have noted, it does have a nice, vaguely Big Lebowski-ish flavor to it. The Coen Brothers might indeed have a fine time adapting this book...if they hadn't already made a film just like it.
But you know what we did enjoy a helluva lot more? Sam Anderson's LOL-inducing shredding of Inherent Vice, in which the New York mag scribe goes so far to claim that even the irksome name 'Thomas Pynchon' reminds him of 'some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster."
Read the review, skip the novel. If you've got a literary fix try curing it with Ron Currie Jr.'s Everything Matters!, or Stephen Elliott's irreverent meta-memoir, The Adderall Diaries (out September 1st from Graywolf Press.)
