[3 articles] Soft-Boiled
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/08/03/090803crbo_books_menand Pynchon's stoned detective. by Louis Menand August 3, 2009 "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean," Raymond Chandler's famous dictum states. It appeared in an essay called "The Simple Art of Murder," published in 1944Chandler's attempt to define what might give a little literary dignity to the murder mystery. Chandler had aspirations for the genre, and it annoyed him that most mystery writers seemed not to, that they turned out unrealistic plot contraptions for an undemanding readership"Murder on the Orient Express"-type theatricals, in which the solution to the mystery is usually whatever is least probable. Chandler believed that what redeemed the form, what made it art, or potentially art, was the character of the detective, and that the detective should be (unlike Hercule Poirot or, from another mystery writer Chandler held in contempt, Lord Peter Wimsey) a man who goes down mean streets. "He is the hero," Chandler wrote. "He is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor." The personal honor of the private eye is the genre's most hallowed convention. He owes nothing to anyone. He is in it only for himself; therefore, he is selfless. In Chandler's description: "He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. . . . The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure." The detective in Chandler's books is Philip Marlowe, a character probably created on the model of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. (Hammett was a mystery writer Chandler did admire. "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse," he said.) Lew Archer is Ross Macdonald's private eye; Mike Hammer is Mickey Spillane's. Thomas Pynchon's is named Larry (Doc) Sportello. Sportello is the best thing in Pynchon's self-consciously laid-back and funky new novel, "Inherent Vice" (Penguin; $27.95). The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical playoriginal sin is an obvious analogybut, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, "Inherent Vice" does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It's a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch "Gilligan's Island" instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It's "The Maltese Falcon" starring Cheech and Chong, "The Big Sleep" as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it's funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It's funnier than Chandler, anyway. Like most detective novels, "Inherent Vice" begins with an apparently innocuous request. Doc's old girlfriend shows up and asks him to look into a problem involving a wealthy real-estate developer with whom she's been having an affair. Almost as soon as Doc takes the case, the developer turns up missing. And, as in most detective stories, the missing person is a thread that, once pulled, unravels a complex conspiracy of murder, greed, lust, and so forth. The missing person or the murder victim (often they are the same person, although that's not the case here) is, of course, just the donnée, a clothesline on which to hang a series of implausible coincidences and, for the private eye, misadventures high and low, with the occasional unanticipated amorous encounter. The victim is almost never someone we are interested in. Who cares or even remembers (as Chandler pointed out in "The Simple Art of Murder") who killed Miles Archer, Spade's partner, in "The Maltese Falcon"despite the fact that Archer's murder is what sets off the whole business? Pynchon's capacity for goofball invention is limitless. A list of characters' names, drastically abridged, might be enough to suggest the variety, and also the relative fineness, of the narrative texture: Ensenada Slim, Flaco the Bad, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Petunia Leeway, Jason Velveeta, Scott Oof, Sledge Poteet, Leonard Jermaine Loosemeat (a.k.a. El Drano, anagram of Leonard), Delwyn Quight, and Trillium Fortnight. Not overly fine, in other words. Plotwise, there are probably too many pieces of the puzzle to hold in your head, and it's not completely clear where, or whether, every piece fits. But that, too, is standard business procedure in the form. Despite Chandler's demand for greater realism, his own plots could be pretty far-fetched, and they're not always coherent, either. When Howard Hawks was shooting the film adaptation of "The Big Sleep," he got in touch with Chandler to ask who was supposed to have killed one of the characters, a chauffeur. Chandler was embarrassed to say he didn't know. Pynchon's novel is set in Los Angeles, which is by no means a departure from hardboiled tradition. This is partly because mystery writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they were), and so have lived near Hollywood, and also because movie and television crime stories have been shot in and around L.A. for a century, since it's cheaper not to travel. Marlowe and Archer both work in L.A. So does Walter Mosley's detective, Easy Rawlins. Southern California, in real life a place of few dark alleys and little weather, is bona-fide noir territory. The twist is the time period. The events in Pynchon's story take place in the spring of 1970, something we can infer from frequent references to the Manson trial and the N.B.A. finals between the Lakers and the Knicks. And the book is loadedoverloaded, really, but Pynchon is an inveterate encyclopedistwith pop period detail: "Dark Shadows," "Marcus Welby, M.D.," and "Hawaii Five-O"; Blue Cheer, Tiny Tim, and the Archies; Casey Kasem, Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert. There are some local Southland referencesthe used-car dealer Cal Worthingtonand a few bits of rock-and-roll esoterica ("Here Come the Hodads," by the Marketts; "Super Market," by Fapardokly). The proto-Internet makes an appearance: "This ARPAnet trip," one character explains; "I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange worldtime, space, all that shit." There are a lot of drug jokes, and there are a lot of drugs (though, strangely, little reference to the antiwar movement: the bombing of Cambodia, mentioned in passing, took place in the spring of 1970). Nixon has been President for a year. The sand is running out on the counterculture. Doc, Pynchon's private eye, is a countercultural type. He wears his hair in an Afro. He's peace-loving and undersized. (" 'What I lack in al-titude,' Doc explained for the million or so -th time in his career, 'I make up for in at-titude.' ") Mainly, he's a pothead. His thoughts are the usual private-eye thoughts, but if the private eye was, say, Jeff Spicoli: If he had a nickel for every time he'd heard a client start off this way, he could be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him. Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer would have eaten this guy for breakfast. But he does walk down mean streets (or the L.A. equivalent: bikers, drug dealers, sex-club performers, nefarious dentists) and is not himself mean. He pines after the ex-girlfriend, flees in terror a never-ending sequence of heavies, fences with his police counterpart (another hardboiled conventionin this case, the cop is a hippie-hater named Bigfoot Bjornsen), takes on cases without hope of a fee, is nice to his mom, and shares his stash. He is a man of honor, and a neat, counterintuitive creation. The epigraph to "Inherent Vice""Under the paving-stones, the beach!"was a slogan in the Paris student uprising of May '68, and it's a reminder that Pynchon does have a stake in this period. Biographical claims about Pynchon are notoriously uncheckable, but he is supposed to have been living in Manhattan Beach in the late nineteen-sixties, working on "Gravity's Rainbow," and there is a lot of affection in these new pages for the way of lifesurf, drugs, and rock and rollthey describe. "Inherent Vice" is a generally lighthearted affair. Still, there are a few familiar apocalyptic touches, and a suggestion that countercultural California is a lost continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of coöptation and repression: Was it possible, that at every gatheringconcert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, whereverthose dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear? The world is going to hell. Which is what private eyes always think. -------- There are more quests than answers http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/26/pynchon-churchwell-inherent-vice Through a fug of dope, Thomas Pynchon takes his cast of misfits to the end of a loose, quixotic trilogy, says Sarah Churchwell Sarah Churchwell 26 July 2009 Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon pp384, Jonathan Cape, £18.99 In Thomas Pynchon's 1973 book, Gravity's Rainbow, a character sings a song called "My Doper's Cadenza", which could serve as both soundtrack and subtitle for Inherent Vice. Set in the waning days of the era of free love, as Charles Manson brings a paranoid ending to quixotic dreams, Pynchon's seventh novel bridges The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990), forming a loose trilogy traversed by the same (marginal) characters and (central) concerns, not to mention a permeating 60s dope haze. In all three novels, California represents the final frontier of the American Dream and the last stand against corrupt institutions, the ultimate refuge of aimless dreamers riding waves of hope and fear. Together, the three novels trace an arc from the mid-1960s to the Reaganite 1980s, from the birth of counterculture to the triumph of corporate culture, as the frontier closes for good and the long descent into betrayal and greed begins. The book's title provides Pynchon with a new metaphor for three of his oldest preoccupations: entropy, capitalism, and religion, specifically Puritanism. For insurers and preservationists, "inherent vice" describes the innate tendency of precious objects to deteriorate and refers to the limits of insurability and conservation; it suggests that matter (and thus, by extension, materialism) carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Winston Churchill used the phrase to differentiate capitalism from socialism: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." And the phrase suggests original sin, which is what both Pynchon's protagonist and I first took it to mean. If vice is inherent, where do we locate virtue? As usual, Pynchon prefers to approach serious questions through frivolity and pastiche, in this case a hallucinatory spoof of Raymond Chandler. His protagonist, Larry "Doc" Sportello, is a pot-smoking private investigator sent by an ex-flame on the trail of a disappeared tycoon who may or may not have had a crisis of conscience, "after all his years of never appearing to have one", and is now setting up a quasi-socialist commune. The plot proceeds to meander amiably around kidnapping, murder, heroin smuggling, money laundering, loan sharking, insanity, drug addiction and rehab, revolution and counter-revolution, not to mention time travel, the lost continent of Lemuria, and arrepentimiento, which a character defines as "Spanish for 'sorry about that'". A spirit of regret and thwarted hedonism prevails, as characters take refuge in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Along the way, Pynchon assembles a typical cast of eccentrics, misfits and dropouts with wacky names, who live life in pursuit of lost causes. Capitalism in Pynchon tends to take two primary forms (it is always, however, the enemy): the military-industrial complex and land-grabbing. His main characters try to resist both, as Pynchon asks how a country that so mythologises hope can traffic in fear, how it can romanticise its own land while dividing it (into "lots") and selling it off. Sportello may feel and behave like an outlaw, but he is uneasily aware of his complicity with the forces of law and order. Most mysteries begin in confusion and end in certainty; Pynchon likes to change this trajectory, so that what begins a mystery ends as pure chaos. (Well aware how frustrating some readers find this, Pynchon sets up a running gag in Inherent Vice about a class action suit brought against MGM by audiences who don't like the way its stories end.) His piling up of incident and jokes, of comic setpieces and hallucinatory discourses is partly pleasure for its own sake; he loves to fool around, extravagantly indulging his own playfulness. His penchant for embedding puzzles, games and jokes in his books is partly why Pynchon's fans tend toward the cultish. But his games are also whistling in the dark, dancing on the grave of betrayed dreams and abandoned hopes. Like many a Pynchon protagonist before him, Sportello is on a doomed quest. Pynchon's novels are always more or less picaresque journeys; his characters travel perpetually, but rarely arrive anywhere meaningful. What Gravity's Rainbow calls "the terrible politics of the Grail" means that quests in Pynchon are inevitable and also inevitable failures. At best, they will be mock-heroic; at worst, they will be tragic, but they will never succeed. Inherent Vice may be Pynchon's most overtly nostalgic book, featuring a character overcome by a longing he pretends to shrug off. Before the story's end, Pynchon will confront character and reader alike with disintegration, disinheritance, dislocation, dismay; property, security, conservation and conservatism; loss, abandonment, marginalisation, being forgotten or overlooked; the futility of resistance; the pleasures and dangers of popular culture; free will, belief systems, religion and ideology, paranoia and faith; order and chaos, meaning and insignificance. Pynchon tends to spawn such lists, in part because of the proliferating quality of his own ideas and gags, which pinwheel out from metaphorical centres. His books appear superficially jolly, full of jaunty tunes and parodic films ("The Young Kissinger, with Woody Allen" remains a personal favourite), driven by a sportive playfulness that can be frankly exhausting when it's not exasperating. In Pynchon's previous novel, Against the Day (2006), a character, relaxing at an anarchist day spa, asks: "What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time travel?" and Inherent Vice picks up where that question leaves off and plays games with time. While dreaming their utopian dreams, Sportello and his friends watch a soap opera called Dark Shadows, featuring a plotline about parallel time, which confuses all of its viewing audience except the dopers, who have no trouble following it. One of the novel's villains is a loan shark who realises that what people are buying when they purchase interest is actually more time; the characters are buying time in more ways than one. Pynchon even takes the idea of parallel time down to the level of individual sentences, many of which are structured around a chiasmatic doubling of time: "What made him unusual was, was he was black guy." Indeed, Sportello may be a time traveller. Then again, he may not: he has a vision at one point that he was born 3 billion years ago and has travelled to modern America in a time machine invented by scientist-priests, and decorated with Looney Tunes characters. However, since he has just dropped acid when he has this dream, it would seem possible that Sportello is not on an epic journey at all he's just tripping. In other words, Inherent Vice raises the question of whether pot-smoking, to take just one example, is really a revolutionary act. Triviality may be an act of resistance against the tyranny of the serious or it may just be trifling. Humour may be subversive or it may just be a smile. At his best, Pynchon casts a tragic shadow over his characters' antics, grounding his frivolity in grief, terror, doubt and lyrical grace. The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most beautiful, elegiac writing about America since Fitzgerald, as well as packing an intense metaphorical punch about revelation, hierophany, meaning and connection that is far too complex to reduce to precis. By contrast, Inherent Vice is often very funny but in the end only gestures toward meaning, significance in semaphore. That said, it is probably Pynchon's most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale. And although I couldn't now reconstruct who did what to whom or why, well, no one involved in making The Big Sleep knew who killed the chauffeur either. Near the end of Inherent Vice, Sportello looks at the photos of a murder scene and thinks: "It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding a gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice," which Sportello is told "is what you can't avoid". Among other things the characters in Inherent Vice are seeking is a ship once called the Preserved, which represents a dream of escape and safety or safekeeping; preservation resists inherent vice. But the ship has been renamed and may have been abandoned. Thomas Pynchon always returns to the glittering mosaic of doubt; it is what he can't avoid. -------- Pynchon lights up http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/31/pynchon/index.html The famed author is back with a tale of drugs, hippies and paranoia -- and you don't need a decoder ring to read it By Laura Miller July 31, 2009 Hard-boiled detective fiction may not seem like the ideal vehicle for the often cryptic style and subject matter of Thomas Pynchon, but his newest novel proves otherwise. An account of the adventures of a hippie private eye pursuing assorted nonlucrative commissions in a Southern California beach town around 1970, "Inherent Vice" is a sun-struck, pot-addled shaggy dog story that fuses the sulky skepticism of Raymond Chandler with the good-natured scrappiness of "The Big Lebowski." It's an inspired formula; the mystery plot supplies the novel with a minimum of structure (as well as confidence that there's some point to the enterprise) and the genre provides ample cover for Pynchon's literary weaknesses. Of course, to the fanboy contingent that makes up some hefty percentage of his readership, Pynchon has no weaknesses, but those of us who have occasionally glimpsed the emperor in his skivvies must proceed with greater caution. There's nothing quite so dispiriting as slogging your way through 1,085 pages of increasingly repetitive and tedious folderol (i.e., "Against the Day") only to find that its significance ultimately boils down to not much more than sheepish nostalgia for the heyday of the counterculture. Not that "Inherent Vice," which clocks in at a far more surmountable 372 pages, doesn't have essentially the same theme as "Against the Day," but here it's presented straightforwardly, rather than disguised as a misplaced sympathy for anarchist bombers tricked out in mathematical paraphernalia and hot air balloons. Also, unlike the utopian romances and adventure stories Pynchon pastiched in "Against the Day," the hard-boiled genre has its cynicism baked in, furnishing "Inherent Vice" with a downbeat counterpoint to what even the author himself seems to realize is a callow idealization of the hippie scene. Our hero, Larry "Doc" Sportello, plies his unlikely trade behind a door labeled "LSD Investigations" (for "Location, Surveillance, Detection") and decorated with the image of "a giant bloodshot eyeball," painted by speed freaks, the highly detailed capillaries of which have been known to hypnotize potential clients into forgetting what they came for. The office is situated in Gordita Beach (the fictional counterpart of Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon lived during the same period), south of Los Angeles proper and home to the usual Pynchonian assortment of marginal types: stoners, musicians, surfers, small-time crooks, psychics, buxom "bikini babes," nubile "stewardii" and so on. Doc gets a visit from an ex-girlfriend, Shasta, "laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn't read at all" and worried that her new boyfriend, a real estate developer, may be the target of a kidnap plot by his wife and her lover. Doc investigates, then gets knocked out cold in a massage parlor, implicated in a murder and clued into a web of connections involving the Black Panthers, the Aryan Brotherhood, loan sharks, L.A.'s genteel oligarchy, the LAPD, a dodgy sanitarium, a consortium of dentists, a surf band supposedly staffed by zombies and something called "the Golden Fang" -- which could be a schooner, a drug cartel, an archvillain, or maybe just those dentists, or then again, maybe it's all four. Most of the other jobs Doc takes on during the course of the novel -- hard-luck cases to a one -- turn out to be connected to the Golden Fang or the developer, who has gone missing, apparently taking Shasta with him. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of "Inherent Vice" is that, while a few key elements of this baroque construction go unaccounted for, a surprising number of plot strands are more or less neatly tied up by the novel's end. The story isn't easy to follow, but it can be followed -- and without the aid of the sort of secret-decoder-ring-style analysis that often passes for literary discernment among Pynchon devotees. Besides, the reader always retains the option of writing off any stray fancies to pot-induced fantasizing; one of the novel's most amiable qualities is its mellow willingness to blur the line between the author's pet conspiracy theories and the random mental bebop of the merely stoned. Paranoia is also a purview of noir, a genre that shares Pynchon's propensity for regarding arrested development as a form of valiant, but doomed nobility. Everyone in hard-boiled fiction has already fallen from grace before the story even begins, and in its blasted landscape only one or two true men remain, lone knights, clinging to the fading rags of their personal conception of chivalry. In the case of "Inherent Vice," the holdout is both Doc and the community of Gordita Beach, which is being dragged by Greater Los Angeles down the long slide from the crest of a perfect wave. Pynchon conceives of the almost-lost paradise of hippieland, embodied by Gordita Beach, as an enormous postgraduate crash pad, where everyone lounges around all day getting wasted and having sex until evil is introduced in the form of a landlord demanding the rent. Such bummers are caused by nothing more than sheer "greed," the term Pynchon's protagonists use for capitalism, that heartless machine bent on grinding the humanity out of us all. The machine is run by shadowy puppet masters who say things like, "Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor -- all of that's ours, it's always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? One more unit in this swarm of transients ... We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible." The title of the novel refers to a legal term used by insurance underwriters describing a defect integral to a property that will cause it to deteriorate over time. So it is with the shriveling Eden of Gordita Beach, where the potheads are all turning to heroin, the formerly cool have sold their services as narcs and government agents, and whatever slack the straight world (or "flatlanders," as Doc calls them) once cut the hippies has been rescinded in the wake of the Tate-LaBianca killings. The specter of Charles Manson hovers over the novel, partly because the public really did come to view hippies with greater apprehension after the notorious murders, but mostly because the Manson Family represents the perversion of hippiedom's communal vision. They were evidence of the inherent vice in humanity itself, the seeds of violence, idolatry and the abuse of power that no utopian plan can hope to eradicate. The novel's other iconic touchstone is John Garfield, Doc's favorite actor, a movie star who specialized in unpolished working-class heroes, rebelled against the studio system and died young after being blacklisted for his leftist politics. If Manson stands for the corruption of the counterculture, Garfield (who rejected communist authoritarianism as well as conservatism) represents the futility of confronting the world's vast systems of command and control. Doc's policy of remaining detached, helping the odd friend here and there and slipping around the corner whenever the shit hits the fan proves the better part of valor. These are the "arguments" of the novel, in the archaic sense that they summarize the author's message and beliefs and in the contemporary sense that they are social themes for critics and other readers to ferret out, thus demonstrating their analytic chops and allowing everyone involved to feel very smart. But a novel is an aesthetic artifact as well as an intellectual one, and of late Pynchon's fiction has mostly failed as art. "Inherent Vice" almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled "Against the Day;" in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is all too typical of Pynchon's recent fiction, lumbers through a monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in "Oliver Twist." Opportunities to portray interactions of import go to waste; in particular, Pynchon depicts women and sexuality with all the depth and nuance of a 14-year-old who has acquired his entire knowledge of these subjects from the dirty jokes printed on vintage novelty cocktail napkins. Some have contended that the cartoonishness of Pynchon's characters is deliberate, a postmodern spit in the eye of the bourgeoisie ideal of "rounded" fictional psychology. Perhaps, but this argument isn't very convincing, given that Pynchon otherwise evinces conventionally sentimental views of humanity (for example, describing a chain of freeway drivers in a thick fog as "a temporary commune to help each other home"). Let's face it, there's something profoundly futile about mounting a protest against vast, complex systems that use ordinary people like interchangeable cogs by writing novels that are vast complex systems in which the characters amount to interchangeable cogs. What ultimately delivers "Inherent Vice" from this futility are the stubbornly individualistic imperatives of its borrowed genre. The detective story must resolve around a central character -- in this case, Doc -- and Pynchon has no choice but to make something of him. Because his creator is fundamentally sweet (unlike, say, Philip Marlowe's), Doc turns out all right, and in negotiating his fatally compromised moral environment, even attains a paradoxical sort of wisdom. "What, I should only trust good people?" he says to a friend who questions the deal he cuts at the novel's end, a rash yet generous act of faith. "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." When driving in the fog, you sometimes have to take whichever exit presents itself, and hope against hope for the best. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
