Well Begun and All Done: Inherent Vice

It's come to this: We're blogging in a coffee shop!

The book: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon


Opening line: She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.

Closing line: For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be around.

Notable line: “Yeah well, I’m watching cartoons here, okay? and this Donald Duck one is really freaking me out? . . .It’s like Donald and Goofy, right, and they’re out in a life raft, adrift at sea? for what looks like weeks? and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald’s close-ups, is that he has this whisker stubble? like, growing out of his beak? You get the significance of that? . . . We’ve always had this image of Donald Duck, we assume it’s how he looks all the time in his normal life, but in fact he’s always had to go in every day and shave his beak. The way I figure, it has to be Daisy. You know, which means, what other grooming demands is that chick laying on him, right?”

Perhaps the most striking thing about the opening line of Inherent Vice, considering that it is a Thomas Pynchon novel, is how undaunting it is. Pynchon, perhaps the pre-eminent post-modernist of American literature, is known for pyrokinetic language and sentences that often demand repeated rereading to yield their meaning. This opening is positively prosaic, and the book itself is certainly the most accessible thing Pynchon has ever written.

Inherent Vice is a pseudo-noir murder mystery, set, in the best Chandleresque tradition, in Southern California. The novel is set in the early 1970s, though, and the world-weary Sam Spade has been replaced by the pot-addled Larry “Doc” Sportello. The “She” of the opening is Doc’s ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Pynchon always has fun with names), who has come to ask for Doc’s help. Her current lover, she fears, is the target of a scheme to have him declared mentally incompetent: He is a wealthy developer, who has decided that it is wrong to charge people for shelter, and who, as a result, is throwing his fortune into a vast free housing project.

It really doesn’t matter. The semi-straightforward mystery ends up curving off in all manner of directions, involving crooked cops, homosexual ex-cons, and the Golden Fang--which may be a ship, a vast criminal conspiracy, or a semi-underground cabal of dentists--or all of the above. If there is one overarching theme of Pynchon’s work, it is that the world is populated by vast schemes to complex to be grasped by the common herd. Maybe it is all essentially elusive, and maybe we’re all, like Doc, waiting for the fog to burn away.