INHERENT VICE
By Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press. 369 pp. $35.
****

In 2003, Thomas Pynchon came out of reclusiveness just long enough to lend his voice to two guest spots, playing himself, on The Simpsons. It was a perplexing move, considering the prolific author has never been interviewed, and some of his most recent known photographs are from his high school yearbook. In one of the episodes, “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife,” cartoon Pynchon, wearing a bag over his head, contributes the following blurb for the flap of Marge’s novel: “Here’s your quote. Thomas Pynchon loved this book. Almost as much as he loves cameras.” We’ll never know exactly why he chose to do the show, but my guess is because it was hilarious.

Pynchon’s latest book, Inherent Vice, is a similarly perplexing exploit: At 369 pages, it’s a relatively jaunty follow-up to 2006’s Against the Day, a 1,085-page meditation on ... okay, I don’t know. Eleven hundred pages! And it has math in it! (I didn’t read it.) But beyond its brevity, Vice is uncharacteristic for Pynchon because it’s a pulpy noir detective story. Also because it’s a psychedelic stoner comedy. Maybe Pynchon’s been reading Raymond Chandler and watching Cheech and Chong movies, but since the odds of him ever granting anyone an interview are, well, nil, we’ll never know exactly where this one came from.

Larry “Doc” Sportello is a private investigator (a “gumsandal” — he wears huarache sandals and an ankle holster) and a pothead, surfing the final wave of hippiedom in southern California. The year is 1970, chosen because Charles Manson’s presence hangs in the air as justification for paranoia and fear of all things free and communal. Like any good noir, this one begins with a visit and a request from a beautiful woman — namely, Shasta Fey, an ex-girlfriend of Doc’s, who’s of course more beach bunny than femme fatale. She asks Doc to get to the bottom of a scheme to have her lover, a real estate mogul, committed to an insane asylum.

The plot, as Pynchon plots are wont to do, only gets convoluted from there, and eventually encompasses everything from heroin cartels to tax-evading dentists, Ethel Merman-loving thugs to zombies. A characteristically Pynchonian cast of characters (with names like Puck Beaverton, Trillium Fortnight, and Denis “whose name everybody pronounced to rhyme with ‘penis’”) rounds things out.

Making Vice out to be a big old quirkfest isn’t intended to be a knock against the book. It’s the house style with Pynchon, and a connecting thread between this and his other works. The unwieldy scenarios are his way of demonstrating that human life is messy and entropic: trying to make sense of things (social, political, metaphysical, the plot of this damn book, etc.) always results in a movement towards greater chaos.

Pynchon’s cleverly named but generally poorly developed characters have been a point of criticism, but especially here, their cardboard nature helps create a milieu of detachment and loss. And by the end, Doc shows surprising depth, once the fog of pot smoke has lifted. Though before this happens, from the uncomfortable moment he greets a black client as “my brother” to the instance he drools in a meeting because he’s slipped into reminiscence over a particularly tasty cheeseburger, Doc is a buffoon through and through. And his buffoonery is the perfect foil for a plot stuffed with too many twists and turns to hold the reader’s interest on its own. After all, if the detective can’t remember what just happened, why should we?

And as if there weren’t enough going on in this book, framing the detective story is a larger, more impenetrable mystery: what the future holds. From where we stand, we know that Reaganism, suburban housing developments, the Information Age, etc. are on their way, but the characters are just waiting “for the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.” I think the most telling moment comes when Doc uses an actual Internet prototype, the ARPAnet, to find some information he needs, despite his colleague’s warning that it “takes souls.” There’s a necessary sadness in change, even if we’re prepared. What really makes Inherent Vice great is this aching and palpable sadness, and Pynchon, not getting too close, is able to capture it beautifully, like a filmmaker finding the perfect distance from which to frame his final shot.

Ultimately, though, I still get the sense that Pynchon’s fine with someone picking up his book just to laugh at all the oddball jokes. There’s a moment where Doc, watching TV in a Vegas hotel room, lands on the movie Godzilligan’s Island. You can almost picture (well, maybe not picture) Pynchon giggling to himself as he writes this passage, a digression which actually includes a recap of a scene in which the castaways meet the monster. How does it end? Characteristically, Doc falls asleep halfway into the movie and wakes up the next day to “Henry Kissinger on the Today show going, ‘Vell, den, ve schould chust bombp dem, schouldn’t ve?’”

For my money, at least on first reading, these moments are some of the greatest pleasures the book offers: I couldn’t tell you exactly who dun what in Inherent Vice, but I can tell you about Godzilligan’s Island, and I’m okay with that.