It sounds dense, ready to send the professors scrambling to their reference libraries, but like all Pynchon’s novels, short or long, it is an almost hermetically sealed world, which you can navigate best by surrendering to authorial sensibility. In this, Pynchon is less post-modernist than 18th-century, Laurence Sterne rolling joints while driving with the top down and the radio blasting. It’s great fun, but as I chortled over an analysis of the inexplicable death wish of Charlie the Tuna, from television adverts of my youth, or nodded in agreement with the amazement of a character’s seeing The Wizard of Oz in colour for the first time, I wondered if others might experience a ‘you had to be there’ moment.
Which may be part of the point. Doc finds himself caught in a ‘low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into the darkness.’ He winds up driving, lost literally in the fog. Wolfmann’s disappearance has a lot to do with acquiring, and losing, the hippie mentality; Manson’s followers, after all, thought of themselves as flower children. Inherent Vice is Pynchon looking back on an era, caught up in its own stoned entropy, and looking back on himself, Lot 49 Redux. You don’t have to have been there; if you’re willing, he’ll take you there.
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