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Thursday, September 03, 2009
Nixon on the $20 bill
Inherent Vice is a deceptively ordinary gumshoe tale set in 1960s California. The deception is of a meta sort, because whilst this novel indulges in lots of familiar, even (now) over-familiar Pynchoniana—the daft names, the terrible made-up pop lyrics, the oversalted stretches of dialogue breaking, suddenly, into long, gnarled ropes of prosey-poetic description—it lacks the conceptual hauteur, the encyclopedism and the tromp l’oeil profundity of Pynchon’s big books. In fact this is true to the point where it doesn’t really read like a Pynchon novel at all. It’s a Pynchon novel pretending to be something else.
I’m assuming the point, here, is about the way attentiveness to the particular, the minutiae, overwhelms the ability to parse a larger picture—like (in a key image) paying closer and closer attention to a crime-scene photograph until it begins ‘to float apart into little blobs of colour’. That’s one key reason why the protagonist is a stoner private investigator; and the case he is hired to investigate is one of prodigious, even fractal complexity: a property financier who goes missing; his wife’s lover; the financier’s girlfriend (who is also the P.I.’s ex); policemen who double as TV stars; smuggling; black panthers; rock bands; drugs; Aryan brotherhood, Vietnam, the mysterious and perhaps ubiquitous Golden Fang … it all has a place, and written such that it’s a taxing business trying to follow all the ins-and-outs. But that’s germane; Pynchon overplots, overcomplicates, because what he’s interested in is not the plot at all. Or more precisely, what he’s interested in is: not the coherence of the plot, but rather the moment of the cannabis hit, when some hitherto overlooked and almost certainly entirely irrelevant detail suddenly looms massively in your dope-piqued consciousness. That’s what the novel enacts. Or, at any rate, those are the moments that stuck in my mind.
Beyond that it’s pretty much puttering around in a psychedelic country, Manson-LSD territory, the man whose spliffs were all exactly alike. Which is to say: Dickic, if rather more overwritten.
And then there’s stuff like this pastiche Eliotic ‘Fire Sermon’/Waste Land riff on the dryness of the sunshine state:
It was late winter in Gordita, though for sure not the usual weather. You heard people muttering to the effect that last summer the beach didn’t have summer until August, and now there probably wouldn’t be any winter till spring. Santa Ana had been blowing all the smog out of downtown L.A., funneling between the Hollywood and Puente Hills on westward through Gordita Beach and out to sea, and this had been going on for what seemed like weeks now. Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody’s skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, and the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light towards the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor take warning skies … Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody’s dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there’d only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight. [98]
I’ll put up with almost any amount of oversauced half-amusing goofiness and plot-vermicelli for passages like that.
Note: ‘Dickic’: The novel is reminiscent of Phil Dick to the extent that it is about, and is a manifestation of, certain kinds of ‘rational’ paranoid states of mind; and to the extent that it is consistently fascinated by alternate realities, aliens, junk culture, the plot behind the plot (the mob behind the mob) k.t.l. There are also more specific Dickic touches: the druggy stuff from Scanner Darkly; twenty-dollar bills in circulation with Nixon on them, which seemed to me quasi-Ubik-ic.
Comments
Haven’t read it yet, but given that I once read somewhere, probably on the back cover blurbs on one of his novels, that PKD was “the poor man’s Thomas Pynchon” what does it now mean that Pychon’s latest book is Dickic (Dickesque? Not Dickish, certainly...) with a bit of quasi-Ubikicity? Is Pynchon now “the rich man’s (Philip) Dick?”
Sorry, couldn’t resist…
PKD’s brand of paranoia seems to me to be distinct from Pynchon’s. The suggestion at one bookchat whereat I hang out was that the sinsemilla and sensibility was closer to Tom Robbins. Anyway, reprising my comment there:
Well, I expected more play with the genre rather than just in it. A lot of layered subreferencing, and throwaway lines sometimes a paragraph in length, but the whole thang hit me as parodic not only of noir but of his own self (w/ oblig inside subrefs, which oughta keep the pynchon listserv busy), a la Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins! ... which I consign to a more minor amusement, a sideshow at the carnival (kismet of which he is of course aware). Not that he ain’t adept in pulling together disparate threads from LA culture before during and after, or that his deft touch fails him in riffing on it. I’d say about on a par with Vineland (the North was always deeper anyway, at least superficially), another not my favorite.
If anybody would like to do an online reading group for this novel, please email me. Something like a a chapter a day. Blog could be set up for it, etc.
nnyhav, the important difference between Dick’s paranoia and Pynchon’s is that Pynchon always undermines the paranoid perspective in his novels. That’s one of the themes in every one of his books: there never *is* any big conspiracy, but instead history is a confluence of micro-forces. His perspective is basically that of Adam Smith’s: it may seem like a giant Invisible Hand, but it’s really the coincidence of every individual’s and each group’s self-interest.
On a more serious note, in response to Luther Blisset’s comment I have to say that Dick also sometimes undermined his own paranoid perspective. At least this is the case in one of his non-SF novels, “Humpty Dumpty in Oakland,” in which the protagonist builds an entire paranoia-driven conspiracy in his head, gets into a lot of trouble, and eventaully realizes he was basically wrong about the whole thing…
”...there never *is* any big conspiracy.”
I’d be minded to challenge this, as an assessment of Pynchon. You’re saying Lot 49 gives you enough data confidently to assert that Trystero definitely doesn’t exist? That there certainly is no Golden Fang in Inherent Vice?
The really funny thing is that Adam Smith did think there was an Invisible Hand (i.e., a separate agency, not just an emergent property of individual actions).
I enjoyed Inherent Vice: the mismatch between typology (stoner culture) and genre (noir) is very amusing; one early highlight in this vein is when the detective and his stoner lawyer are talking on the phone, and the lawyer tells him to turn on the tv. In genre, the tv should be showing a news report on the crime, but typologically, the stoner has just realized something terrifying about an ordinary movie showing on tv.
(The mix of type and genre may also be interested if you’ve read Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, where populist paranoiac types and Horatio Alger-"Ragged Dick” types commingle.)
That said, as much as I enjoyed the new Pynchon, this wrong type in the wrong genre setup seems too reminiscent of the Coen Bros.’s Big Lebowski, which also featured a stoner caught up in Chandleresque noir. What sets Pynchon apart, I think, is the manifest historical angle, which is very much unlike Dick, I think, whose historicism was more latent.