Lost in the fog

Thomas Pynchon’s reputation has risen and fallen over the past five decades; one of his conspiracy-chasing characters might note a pattern of inverse relation to rises and falls in the world’s financial markets. Gravity’s Rain- bow, 36 years ago, confirmed Pynchon as America’s new great reclusive genius; since then battalions of academics have made careers reinforcing his reputation for obscurantism, while sharp-jawed reviewers have leapt upon each perceived failure to top that book with the excitement of jackals scenting a dying lion. Inherent Vice may generate huge sighs of relief from both sides; it’s a third the length of Pynchon’s previous novel, Against the Day, and it’s structured as a detective story.

A period detective story, no less, set in 1969, when paperback copies of Pynchon’s second, slimmest, novel, The Crying of Lot 49, might still be found sticking out of the back pockets of dungarees. Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is the sleuth, approached by his ex-girlfriend Shasta to find her missing current squeeze, property developer Mickey Wolfmann. Doc slips comfortably into the continuum of Pynchon’s hapless ‘heroes’, like Benny Profane (V) or Tyrone Slothorp (Gravity’s Rainbow), and the parallels with Lot 49 are striking: in that novel Mucho Maas’ wife Oedipa left him for a richer, more powerful man who has disappeared. Lot 49 featured the shadowy Yoyodyne Corporation; Vice’s equivalent is the Golden Fang, which might be a drug- smuggling Chinese tong, or a worldwide conspiracy, or just a clearing house for dental conventions.

Quests into the hearts of conspiracies, real or imagined, lie at the root of Pynchon’s fictions, and those conspiracies often reflect forces of nature whose rules humans forget apply. In the context of the late Sixties, reality and imagination are shifting concepts, and Doc, ambling through the novel like a stoned Elliott Gould playing Marlowe in Robert Altman’s Long Goodbye is not the most reliable of protagonists.