Finished reading: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon 📚

I enjoyed this book very much, and if you asked me to write a book report on it, I would fail spectacularly.

The prose was gorgeous - I loved every word. It was immersive, evocative, and rhythmic. The protagonist is stoned for most, if not all, of the book, and it read that way. Although this was my first Pynchon novel, I have read all the greats when it comes to hard boiled detective fiction: Chandler, Hammett, Ellroy, and despite the fundamental grooviness, this book somehow sits squarely with the rest of them.

Our PI gets engaged and then sort of drifts through the story, which honestly, Philip Marlowe does plenty of, you know? This novel was like Ellroy’s L.A. Noir reimagined by Hunter Thompson. There is organized crime, croooked cops, setups and double-crosses, everything a good detective story needs, but it’s all swirled up with hazy, languid language that very successfully conjures LA’s hippie phase.

I was enjoying the story anyway, but I was all in when we found a morgue drawer filled with frozen chocolate bananas for our dirty LA detective. I genuinely laughed at that; ditto when Doc being represented by a maritime attorney paid off at the end.

I didn’t do myself any favors by reading this book in fits and starts before bed and on plane rides. If I tackle another Pynchon - and I plan to - I’ll approach it with a little more structure. Chapter by chapter, in the morningtime, taking it slow.

As a very unimportant aside, I work in an insurance-adjacent job, and found it interesting that “inherent vice” is a real insurance term.

All in all - great read, and I’m anxious to try something else by this author, although I think I’ll pick something off my physical to-read pile first.

#bookstodon