(“gumsandal”) Doc Sportello, is alluringly mobile, afloat on a wave of poetic eloquence and period argot that can go anywhere, and is at its best washing over landscapes and through interiors: of the novel’s hero, Gordita Beach hippie P.I. The narrative voice, third-person limited with free indirect discourse from the P.O.V. Plots: inscrutable.” Due to Pynchon’s delightful prose, I was in love with Inherent Vice for about 50 pages, to the extent of wishing I had combed the California beaches a bit more when I’d had the chance.

Pynchon’s complexly plotted beach novel is narrated beautifully as a stoner-Chandler pastiche my hardly original verdict on Raymond Chandler, after the novella and half-a-novel of his I managed to read, was, “Prose: delightful. (I didn’t have a high school subculture per se-I think I invented normcore, mostly so that I could stay on the good side of all, jocks, cheerleaders, punks, hippies, nerds, brains, ravers -though I was mostly identified with the goths, trying to turn the non-comics-reading girls onto Sandman back when Gaiman was, like, a fringe thing, man, and not the embarrassing sellout thing he became.) I am neither stoner nor beach bum the month and a half I once spent in L.A. Furthermore, I can’t even follow the plots of straight thrillers, let alone thrillers deliberately detourned from coherence. You can surely guess the first I’ve read that one three times, if it counts for anything, and come to think of it, I have also read the first 100 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow three times. It’s only the second Pynchon novel I’ve ever read. I am not this novel’s target demographic, to put it in the language of commerce that routed the hippie dream from within.

Thomas pynchon in inherent vice