Mindless Pleasures: Playlists, Unemployment, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

If we are to judge by the amount of critical work devoted to it, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is his least interesting work. But the lack of critical consideration has less to do with the quality of the novel, than with the challenge it puts to readers of contemporary fiction. Throughout Inherent Vice, Pynchon attempts to alter how we approach the task of reading maximalist novels in the age of the Internet. Pynchon’s citation of his own references, gaming with ontological clarity, and celebration of cloudy intellectual powers, are strategies he employs in Inherent Vice to reevaluate what novels can offer us in the twenty-first century.