Thomas Jones writes:

The experience of reading Inherent Vice is probably as close to getting stoned as reading a novel can be. It brings on fits of the giggles and paranoia jags, and badly messes with your short-term memory: the plot, as ever with Pynchon, is bewilderingly hard to follow, the plethora of characters almost impossible to keep track of without taking notes (as it happens, the protagonist, Doc, is a bit of a compulsive notetaker, to help compensate for his doper’s memory). It doesn’t, however, make you fall asleep or, despite the many descriptions of the consumption of every conceivable variety of fast food, give you the munchies. Amid all the shenanigans, Pynchon finds time to acknowledge the rise of the world wide web – one of Doc’s contacts has hacked into ARPAnet, the precursor of the internet established by the Department of Defense and various West Coast universities – and to take a few sideswipes at the war on terror (‘these days . . . most of the energy in this office [the FBI] is going into investigating Black Nationalist Hate Groups’) and the credit crunch: ‘It isn’t new money exactly . . . more like new debt. Everything they own, including their sailboats, they’ve bought on credit cards from institutions in places like South Dakota that you send away for by filling out the back of a match cover.’

(LRB 10 September 2009)

Vintage | hardback 369 pp. |ISBN: 9780224089487