Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (2009)

I like most about this book what I like about Bret Easton Ellis and contemporary pop music: the denial of thought, the absence of introspection. Characters talk and act, there is almost nothing in between.

The plot is a mystery, in the conventional sense and in that it never made sense to me at any time. It doesn't matter, though. The individual scenes are good enough to want to keep reading. The book is engaging not because we're hungry for answers to contrived questions, because we know that great writing is always to come come.

It's set in the sixties - not the real sixties: rather what pop culture would like us to believe the sixties were. It's told from the perspective of wake-and-bake smoker detective. The consequential humor (confusion, literalism, etc.) is faithful to what is actually funny on weed.

Inherent Vice is different from the other Pynchon I read - Gravity's Rainbow - in that it's consistent and focused. The prose is comprehensible - mostly dialogue, short sentences/paragraphs/words - which must have been difficult for Pynchon (all the more reason to admire it) considering his heretofore flamboyant prose. Inherent Vice is better than Gravity's Rainbow. It's not the consensus due to an unfortunate trend I've noticed in book criticism - they (the critics) love long, aimless, fractured books, and are wary of shorter, saner, better works, especially within the body of work of a single author [1], which stems (I think) from their (i.e. the critics') desire to read The Brothers Karamazov (or any given Dickens/Tolstoy) for the first time again.

I wrote this review not because I thought I had something to say, but because I was too afraid of failure to return to the short story I've been writing.

I have recently embraced the idea that it is better to accept my emotions than fight them (I tried to write about this in a diary entry but I found it boring while re-reading so I cut it as with most of everything I recently wrote, hence the previous four entries' brevity), but I'm not sure I could "accept" (right now) the consequential feelings I'd get from inadvertently destroying my own story and soiling (in my mind) its brilliant incendiary premise. I point this out because I want you to know that I know that this is not good - I know very little about books and this was just an amateurish analysis with no point. This "review" (this "critique") is a consequence of my fear and insecurity.

1. (e.g., DeLillo's Point Omega > Underworld, Wallace's The Depressed Person > Infinite Jest, Burroughs' Junkie > Naked Lunch)