Inherent vice pancakes full#

Inherent vice pancakes full#

The summer of love was 1967, but still in 1969 the women are willing, especially with a guy walking around with a shirt pocket full of joints.ĭuring the course of his investigations Doc gets bludgeoned from behind (it is not a real noir novel until the detective gets popped from behind) and during another altercation is spiked with a really bad trip.Įven though this book is considered more accessible I still would have a difficult time suggesting this to a mystery reading crowd. Doc, for a pot smoking hippie, or maybe because of it, gets laid a lot. The plot becomes more convoluted to the point that Doc and the reader are left wondering who and what he is really investigating. As the novel progresses the reader is exposed to a blur of characters. He walks around in a permanent pot haze that contributes to the afore mentioned reasons why he isn't a very good detective. He falls asleep on stakeouts, he forgets most of what he has figured out from the investigation, and he frequently says the wrong thing. This is one of those cases, prevalent in American hard boiled literature where the detective basically lives on air because he is always taking on hard luck cases that have no chance to actually pay him for his time.ĭoc is really not a very good detective. Shasta has been approached by the wife of the man she is involved with, Mickey Wolfmann, and her boyfriend with a plan to kill Mickey. Doc is asked by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth, yes the novel is full of wonderfully concocted Pynchonesque names, to help her out of jam. Under the back drop of peace, love and revolution(right after I finish one more doobie)in 1969. Our intrepid hero Doc Sportello is the owner and operator of LSD Investigations. The only other Thomas Pynchon I've ever read is Gravity's Rainbow, but I will say there is certainly plenty of meat on the bone in Inherent Vice. I haven't read enough Pynchon to be an authority on whether this is medium well Pynchon or medium rare. I have read other people referring to this as 'Pynchon Lite' which reminds me of food off the vegetarian menu. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: people published ever very few photographs and since the 1960s circulated rumors about his location and identity.ĭisclaimer: at no time was the reviewer stoned, tweaked, inebriated or involved in any felony endeavors during the reading of this book. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles, and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many readers and critics regard Pynchon as one of the finest contemporary authors. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the Navy of the United States and earned an English degree from Cornell University. People note dense and complex works of fiction of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Junior, based in city of New York. Novels, such as Gravity's Rainbow (1973), of American writer Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, often depict individuals, struggling against shadowy technocratic forces.