Somnopolis

Thomas Pynchon’s latest comes quick on the heels of Against the Day and clocking in under five hundred pages is doubly surprising for this is an author who has vanished for years at a time, only for a large opus to suddenly appear every odd decade.  Like Salinger, or Terrence Malick he is seen as an eccentric recluse, whose output can divide readers between those who find him incomprehensible, or a revelation.

I confess I find his books to be a struggle sometimes. Characters and locations sidle up to the reader without warning, as Pynchon’s sentences are long flowing threads that need to be concentrated on. Nothing can be taken for granted as the goal is not so much ease of comprehension, but taking the literary form to strange new places.

So Gravity’s Rainbow ends in a Cabalist fugue, while Inherent Vice introduces us to the stoned thought patterns of Doc Sportello, whose every utterance is a minefield of question marks. Pynchon may give readers the impression of resorting to automatic writing on occasion, but there is a disciplined confusion of form and style here.

As I have said here before, this book reminds me of The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye. Both films took the model of a Raymond Chandler story and then aerated the claustrophobic noir form with the breezy indolence of post-loved up LA. Doc has a lot in common with the Dude, his stoned amicability allowing him to cruise into danger and blithely ignore the threats of powerful men. His way of life is a thorn in the side of ‘straight’ culture, as he appears to have found a neat middle-ground between the compromises of selling out and the naive hedonism of hippies.

While the Coens parodied Marlowe with the Dude, an unemployed bowler discussing the case of the Big Lebowski as if he has become convinced he is an actual PI – Doc Sportello has a detective’s licence and a reputation as a man who can be trusted to get the job done. Often pro bono. He even has a contact in the LAPD – Bigfoot Bjornsen – although the Swedish giant is just as likely to be Doc’s torturer as ally. The grudging respect between the two thankfully never devolves into the stereotypical ‘buddy up’, model of Hollywood. Doc is under no illusions. LA is haunted by the dual phantoms of the Watts riots and Charles Manson. He and his ‘kind’, are hated by the police and the feeling is more than mutual. Mention is made of the Mod Squad, the show that argued it was cool to be a narc. Doc is wise enough to bite the hand that feeds him.

The cover jacket blurb to Inherent Vice mentions that this is a departure for Pynchon, his own take on the detective novel. The plot does contain the usual tropes. Doc is hired to investigate two cases that are related. He finds himself caught in the middle of a massive conspiracy involving sex, drugs and real estate. Even the old standard of the femme fatale enters the proceedings, his ex Shasta who hires him to look into what soon becomes a missing person’s case.

In the end though I believe Inherent Vice fits neatly into the Pynchon canon. Like Against The Day, Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow it is a story that revolves around the disillusionment with an era. The sixties are cosily remembered as a time of free love and the peace movement. Pynchon reminds us that Helter Skelter forever damned the hippies in the public eye as potential cults plotting murderous rampages and justified widespread police aggression. When so much politically was at stake, the idealism of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy’s Camelot enshrined by martyrdom, characters seem more interested in discussing episodes of Gilligan’s Island, The Mod Squad, or Dark Shadows. Sinking into nostalgia and witless trivia the sixties was transformed into a fiction of itself before it had ended. As Doc shambles from one adventure to another, he seems to represent a curious wisdom. Everyone is compromised, so why not trust the bad guys to do something right for a change?

“What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn’t give odds either way.”

After months of it squatting ominously on my bookshelf, I finally cracked the spine of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Needless to say I’m loving it. A cardinal rule of writing, according to my English teacher Dinny Craven following on from George Orwell – is short, sharp sentences. Ideas in writing should be conveyed as simply as possible, avoiding over-decorative language that is both wasteful and pretentious. The reader should be able to understand what the writer is saying at all times. This is writing as an instructive experience.

Pynchon’s goes the other way entirely, but as he was a student of Nabokov (whose wife claimed she could recall the young American’s distinctive hand-writing) I detect a clarity and form in the verbosity. The Chums of Chance – a band of pulp novel adventurers – leap onto the page, sailing into the upper atmosphere, buoyed up by hot-air tales of subterranean jousting with dwarves and the evil machinations of the many varied forces in the world whom they are bound to fight…

…We also are treated to the struggle of ordinary Americans in a time when unions are viewed with suspicion and slandered as communistic anarchists, when the ideas of Tesla are buried to prevent a loss of earnings for the corporate classes. It is exhilirating, genius material and delivered with wide ranging, concussive bursts of ideas. Pynchon creates a chemical marriage of fantasy and historical fiction, that is more profound and full condensed insight into the period than any leaden academic study.

Every moment I open a page I feel love.