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The ending of 'Inherent Vice' has Doc Sportello the 'hero' of 'Inherent Vice' lost in a fog. 'Inherent Vice' is a very 60's novel but at the same time it shows that a lot of the 60's was missed by people in the 60's. A lot of people were lost in the fog. There are really no larger forces at work here. The basic plot has been covered by hundreds of movies and books. In 'Inherent Vice' people are being tossed and turned by outside forces of which there is no attempt to grasp. Sex is available. Have sex. Drugs are available. Take drugs. People are flawed. Original Sin aka inherent vice is the key human fact. This is by no means a jeremiad against hippies. The guess is that hippies and now ex hippies are a substanital portion of Pynchon's 'crew'. Thomas Pynchon has the best natural ability of any writer in the US maybe the world but Pynchon here decided to write a book of half played out dope riffs. Of course much dope humor really does fall flat and fail to reach a punch line. The second half of the book is somewhat entertaining as the plot comes together somewhat entertaingly a first for Pychnon. 'Inherent Vice' might be filmable. 'Inherent Vice' is in many respects a valentine to 60's hippies but the 60's are still a mystery of which 'Inherent Vice' offers no clarification.

Readers of Thomas Pynchon novels in the past usually were left wondering about the mysteries of the plots and their characters. So it is time that the author turned his attention to the mystery genre. And while this novel somehow is classified as a mystery, featuring a psychedelic PI, Larry Sportello, a/k/a Doc, it is more of a far-out effort obfuscated by marijuana smoke. Set in Los Angeles in the 1960s, with Vietnam, hippies, drugs and the like running throughout, the plot begins with Doc being told by an ex-girlfriend that there is a plot to kidnap her current lover, a billionaire real estate developer. Thus begins a bizarre tale filled with all kinds of weird characters, with even stranger names, a favorite Pynchon ploy. So we find Dr. Blatnoyd; Bigfoot, an LAPD detective lieutenant; Denis (pronounced "penis"); FBI agents Flatweed and Borderline; and a whole host of others. It really is impossible to describe the absurdity of the novel. Is it noir? Is it a spoof? Is it just Pynchon being playful? Is it satire? Who knows? But it is all-encompassing and some might think it is a tour de force, and it is recommended.

If this were not a Pynchon novel, no publisher would have printed it. It is filled with anachronisms and prescient references that no one would have made at the time. Police use computers -- admittedly antique ones -- to get information in a way that didn't become common for decades -- and at the urging of the protagonist. ARPAnet, forerunner of the internet, is discussed as if everyone knows about it and it didn't even make an appearance in real life until 1969. It was an unlikely contender for survival but pynchon's characters ballyhoo it. There are unsexy sex scenes and characters who make brief appearances but don't have any resolution of their reason for being there. Save your time and money because pynchon has wasted his.

This was my first Pynchon read and it probably gonna be my last. As a Scandinavian I try to keep up with American literature and pick out half a dozen US books every year. I heard much positive things about Pynchon so my expectations were high. I also lived in Southern California for a year so I was thrilled to read a story that takes place in LA. But the book was a big disappointment. It is a bad detective story (read Stieg Larsson instead) and the writer's comments about American society are without any depth (read Philip Roth instead). I think this is not meant to be a book; Pynchon wants this to be a film. Every chapter (or sometimes part of chapter) will be a great scene. But a book not written to be a book will fail, and this one does fail - big time.

I liked this better than anything Pynchon's written since Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon's not much of a novelist in the classic sense: his plots are byzantine rambling wrecks in which loose ends are never tied up; his women are all "sexy chicks" or older female relatives; you can barely tell his characters apart if they talk for more than a couple sentences, because they all sound like Thomas Pynchon, and they certainly don't motivate his plots. But who cares? Not me, because he's the epic poet of our disintegrating age. In Inherent Vice, Pynchon waxes nostalgic for the lost era when some of us thought that, given enough LSD, we could save our greedy real estate crazed violent society from itself. The vehicle for expressing this nostalgia is Doc Sportello, a pot-head detective who tries to stay groovy with everything, and my favorite of all Pynchon's characters, perhaps because he's more like Pynchon than any of the others, so hearing Pynchon's thoughts in Sportello's brain seems natural. Perhaps due to age, Pynchon's gotten a bit careless about detail, or maybe I just didn't know enough about WWII to notice the time slips in Gravity's Rainbow. According to the Wiki commentary, the novel takes place between March 24th and May 8th, 1970, but during the present tense time of the narration, Lew Alcindor has already changed his name to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, which didn't happen until 1971, and the Manson trial, which didn't start until June 15th, 1970, is taking or has just taken place. Maybe it's all that pot Sportello's been smoking that keeps him from being firmly anchored in time, or maybe Pynchon was in too big a hurry to do the research needed to pin all the novel's events down firmly to one consistent time line. I've said it once, and have to say it again. Who cares when Pynchon's endlessly original and evocative poetry tumbles out of almost every page? This is a novel that's making me re-think my abhorrence of "language" literature. Most novelists can't pull it off, but in Pynchon's case, his voice is almost (except in the case of Mason & Dixon) enough.