I must have run into this Pynchon fellow back when he was working on Gravity’s Rainbow. The reclusive author was living in Manhattan Beach and haunting the coastline of the South Bay of Los Angeles. During the same period Manhattan Beach and nearby Hermosa Beach were my teenage homes away from home, and the places where I hung out — Either/Or Bookstore, the Lighthouse, Zeppies Pizza, Taco Bill’s — were just the sort of storefronts to attract the custom of a counterculture sort like Mr. Pynchon.
I have long wondered which of those beach bums was the eccentric postmodern novelist. Was he there watching the great Buzz Swartz and Matt Gage dominate the strand volleyball scene? Hell, maybe he is Matt Gage — they look enough alike. Or was he seated next to me at the Lighthouse, checking out Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s sax heroics? Or should I believe my friend’s insistence that the erudite gentlemen who dominated the conversation at a book discussion group at the local beach library was in fact the author of Vineland and V.?
Now after reading Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s latest novel, I am all the more convinced that this author was shadowing me all that time. The story is set in Gordita Beach (a stand-in for Manhattan Beach) in April and May of 1970, and is immersed in the surfadelic culture of the period. Yes, the Lighthouse appears here, as do dozens of other places where I might have crossed paths with the secretive Mr. P.
This is more than a novel about the beach; it is also — uncharacteristically for this often challenging author — a book you could bring to the beach for an entertaining read amidst the sand and sun. The plot moves with great speed; by page 25, the reader has already enjoyed a dose of sex, murder, drugs and rock-and-roll. But there is plenty more of all of these to come. Before Inherent Vice comes to its wipeout of a conclusion, you will have encountered enough narcotics to keep a Columbian cartel busy for a year, and so many corpses that Thomas Nogouchi needs to call a temp agency for backup support.
Doc Sportello is the hippie private investigator at the center of these strange happenings. Doc’s track record is spotty at best. He probably commits more crimes than he solves. His memory and mental skills might once have been first-rate, but that was about ten thousand reefers ago. Nowadays he is lucky if he doesn’t have a hallucinatory flashback at the worst possible moment. Even when he delivers the goods, he rarely gets paid. In short, he is more attuned to the karmic valence than the criminal elements surrounding him.
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