For a Good Time, Read Tom

I've never been to Los Angeles, have never smoked pot, am not a fan of detective fiction, and thought Vineland (1990) was flimsy, so I'm not exactly the right guy to review Inherent Vice, which, unless you read reviews only in ABR, you already know is a surfer/doper/private-investigator novel that resembles Vineland more than Pynchon's other books. But I was born in 1944, which offers two advantages: I can recognize many of the late 1960s TV programs and AM songs that saturate this new novel and can sympathize with an author (born in 1937) who, perhaps late in life, wants to have and give his readers a good time. That is, a good time period in the life of the Republic and an entertaining time reading about the almost-free sex and drugs in a California that is no more.

Pynchon's PI, Larry "Doc" Sportello, is twenty-nine but seems much older, ready for retirement. Or maybe it's just his constant marijuana use that gives him senior fuzziness, a very dim memory of recent events, such as what he had for dinner. His ex-girlfriend, Shasta, shows up at his apartment in Gordita Beach (Manhattan Beach, say those who have been to L.A.) to ask Doc to help her new boyfriend, a wealthy real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann. On the case in his desultory fashion, Doc interviews the usual cast of Pynchon zanies, cranks, lovable losers, and central casting tough guys as his original mission uncovers layers of malfeasance.

In an eventual reversal of behavior and names, Shasta turns out to be selfish, and Wolfmann has been kidnapped because of his altruism: he planned to return vast sums of money to Californians he cheated. Even the novel's hippie-hating cop, Bigfoot Bjornsen, reverses Pynchon's usual representative of the State, for Bigfoot helps Doc investigate a musician's return from a faked death. By novel's end, the musician is reunited with his family, Shasta comes back from a mysterious absence, and the abducted Wolfmann returns to life in L.A.

Reversal and return—these are the themes that connect this highly (if coincidentally) plotted genre imitation to Pynchon's original works, the big books that combine multiple plots with encyclopedic and often esoteric information that turns into powerful metaphor. "There is a Hand to turn the time" is one of the last lines of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), sung as Slothrop fails to find his way back to America and the rocket falls to earth. Mason and Dixon tramp westward in space and backward in time to discover an ur-America, but unhappily return to civilization. In the final pages of Against the Day (2006), a man named Virgil sums up that novel's sentiments: "I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans."

Toward the end of Doc's investigations, he peers at a film and thinks, "It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unfor-bidden 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." A phrase from an earlier time, "inherent vice" doesn't imply original sin as much as the extreme difficulty of any retrogressive understanding. V. (1963), Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon (1997), and Against the Day were all historical novels that attempted with research and invention and ingenuity and mass to brave that difficulty, diminish the "vice," and say something profound about American culture.

About a time that Pynchon, according to sketchy biographical accounts, enjoyed, Inherent Vice is content to use recent history as a backdrop for humorous escapades and corny jokes. The year is 1970, Manson is going to trial, and Nixon is president, but there is little evidence that Doc's life—or the...