Inherent Vice takes place in the twilight of an anti-war movement, was written in the dark night that followed another, and was consumed, in my case, at the dawn of a third. Having been born roughly yesterday, I’ll admit that I learned only recently that the United States’ murderous and deceptive war in Iraq was met with mass peace protests arguably as formidable as — and in some cases potentially bigger than — those opposing its devastation of Vietnam. Reading Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel now, as a new movement turns out and begs the government not to back a genocide, it’s hard not to feel some fatigue of the aughts in the book’s hangover from the 60s.
The story’s twisting plots unfold in early 1970s Los Angeles, against the backdrop of not just the Vietnam War, but also the birth of the Internet, a real estate juggernaut, and the Manson Family murders. “Long, sad history of L.A. land use,” comes an early line as Pynchon sets up the narrative. “Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq’s neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates.”
Doc Sportello, the hippie-private-eye main character, is coping pretty alright. He registers his opinions mostly through tossed-off quips — waking up to a Nixon speech on TV, asking if it’s “yet another Hitler documentary” — and his stoned helper-of-all demeanor allows the dismal political straits of the era to pass through him, a semi-radical vehicle. When we learn that Tariq’s South Central neighborhood (formerly Japanese, then “those people got sent to camps”) will be displaced by the fictional Channel View Estates, Doc mentions “the riots,” as in Watts. Tariq corrects: “Some of us say ‘insurrection.’”
Doc is sympathetic to such radicalism, but he doesn’t push it. This makes easy sense in the context that he’s always high. Beyond comic stoner stereotype (of which there is plenty), this allows Pynchon to create busy, mind-bending scenes where there are multiple possibilities for what’s actually happening. (Unlike in some of the author’s other books, all of them are pretty comprehensible.) At several points in Inherent Vice, the fog induced by drugs resembles the fog of war.
In one particularly trippy, action-packed episode, the members of a drugged-up surf rock band called The Boards become zombies, and it’s never entirely clear if the book has slipped into the supernatural or just the psychedelic. In another, Doc splits into two: “Visible Doc, which was approximately his body, and Invisible Doc, which was his mind.”
Outside of any acid trip, Doc does have a double: an LAPD cop (and actor) called Bigfoot Bjornsen, with whom he has a long-running love-but-mostly-hate relationship that gets, perhaps predictably, a bit too cozy. As the book’s main ambassador for normie society — to the point where his real name is Christian and his wife is named Chastity — Bigfoot professes his constant disdain for Doc’s countercultural lifestyle. His first words to Doc are “Congratulations, hippie scum,” which pretty much sets his tone for the rest.
For all the snark Doc shoots back, he’s comfortable with the cops. When he wakes up to Nixon on the TV, he’s been sleeping with one of the many beautiful women who pop up conveniently out of nowhere, a DA who Doc has mostly forgiven for selling him out to the FBI. (In classic Pynchon fashion, the book is nothing if not horny, and Doc finds his sexual encounters with the kind of accidental luck of someone stumbling into a cheese shop not knowing there would be free samples. In a telling early scene, Doc meets one of his occasional sidekicks when she, a sex worker, offers him a deal called the “Pussy Eater’s Special.”) Watching Nixon’s speech, the beautiful DA recognizes a supposed hippie rabble-rouser in the crowd as an almost-colleague: an operative working for the “Public Disorder Intelligence Division.”
Perhaps Doc is able to play ball with the cops because, though they approach it from different angles, they both accept that a reactionary fear has won the new decade. Inherent Vice captures the prevailing narrative that the race-war-aspiring murder streak of the once-communal Manson Family was the nail in the coffin of the hippie movement, putting things like free love and peace protests to bed for decades. In one scene where Doc and Bigfoot all but have a heart-to-heart, Doc asks if the cops are “Scared of what? Charlie Manson?” and Bigfoot confirms:
Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the race rioting you do—it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day…[like] there’s some evil subgod who rules over Southern California? who off and on will wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth?
Doc knows that to Bigfoot he’s the hippie spokesman, and he refuses to take up the obligatory mantle to condemn or condone. “What I’ve been noticing since Charlie Manson got popped is a lot less eye contact from the straight world,” he tells Bigfoot. “You folks all used to be like a crowd at the zoo…but now it’s like, ‘Pretend they’re not even there, ’cause maybe they’ll mass murder our ass’.”
The problem posed by the dark side of collectivism is shot through Inherent Vice. The book’s main villain is not a person, but an obscure, internationally-connected criminal enterprise called the Golden Fang, which takes form, at various points in the book, in a trans-Pacific ship, a cultish drug rehab, and a dentist’s office inside a warped pyramid. (When one character professes to “be” the Fang, Pynchon slips in a political synecdoche: “You mean like J. Edgar Hoover ‘is’ the FBI?”)
By the time Inherent Vice came out, Nixon and Hoover had been replaced by a different notorious Republican administration known for shady conduct in service of war — and then, depending on your view, a new era of Democratic hope or a cynical neoliberal who preached change but largely filled his predecessor’s brutal world-cop shoes. The Golden Fang carries the shifting-but-always-kind-of-the-same traditions of globalization, corruption, and empire through the novel, reappearing from opposing directions that the savvy — or paranoid — reader won’t be shocked to see in cahoots. It has allegedly served in both anticommunist operations for the US government and heroin peddling from Southeast Asia. It knits abundant orientalist tropes to kooky desert death cults.
And what’s the difference between a gang and a cult, anyway? Surely their loosely defined fear-creep could expand to encompass terror(ism), and hey, why not, the concept of evil itself. Come to think of it, maybe one of these Golden Fangs is hiding WMDs.
As a private investigator, Doc is on the hunt for missing people, and in one of the Fang’s many iterations we find trapped two of the book’s elusive semi-victims. Their fates are also politically loaded: one forced to work as a plant “giving revolutionary youth a bad name,” another a landlord-developer-magnate who has had a Marxist awakening and gained a conscience.
“I feel as if I’ve awakened from a dream of a crime for which I can never atone, an act I can never go back and choose not to commit,” the developer reportedly says, per the FBI. “I can’t believe I spent my whole life making people pay for shelter, when it ought to’ve been free.”
Oh, buddy, if you only knew what was coming in 2008.
Doc, though generally well-meaning, expresses no such distress. He’s made a guilt-driven career corrective too, having gotten his start and his nickname working as a menacing collections agent for a loanshark. While he’s moved away from that, and certainly doesn’t feel good about his past shaking down poor people for money, he continues to work in a kind of enforcement, using the formidable skillset he gained from his cruel and capital-serving past. He is, essentially, a cop without a department.
It was, as we hear during a redemption scene for another character (a hot lady who Doc fucks), a “very freaky time for everybody up in Hollywood right after Sharon Tate.” And Doc, rather than an agent or an activist, is a vessel more than anything. (Though he is seen actually standing up for something is a flashback to the summer of ’68, “in the famished aftermath of a demonstration against NBC’s plans to cancel Star Trek.”) It seems like an appropriate if hollow-feeling way to process a certain amount of despair, helplessness, and anxiety.
In one acid trip, Doc stumbles into a fate befitting Pynchon’s iconic Slothrop: “Here he is! The perfect subject!” Doc hallucinates some scientist-priests saying about him roughly 3 billion years before the main narrative. He’s about to be “costumed in what he would soon learn was a classic hippie outfit of the planet Earth, and led over to a peculiarly shimmering chamber in which a mosaic of Looney tunes motifs was repeating obsessively away in several dimensions at once in vividly audible yet unnamable spectral frequencies” — and sent to 70s Southern California, for experiments.
Inherent Vice asks us all to question how it’s possible that we’re living through our current bloodthirsty earthbound nightmares, and perhaps whether they’re really happening at all. It lampoons the idea that people on the left, or belonging to a counterculture, or otherwise oppositional to the mainstream, capitalist, “straight” world, should be expected to answer for the worst excesses of their movement’s extremist outliers. But in a world dominated by fear and lacking in clarity, its protagonist just does what he has to do.
“The third dimension grew less and less reliable,” Pynchon writes as Doc drives through a murky night in one unusually romantic scene. “At first the fog blew in separate sheets, but soon everything grew thick and uniform till all Doc could see were his headlight beams, like eyestalks of an extraterrestrial, aimed into the hushed whiteness ahead.” It’s dreamy, rather than trippy. Doc finds himself in a communal system of cars, headlights linked to taillights, “like a caravan in a desert of perception,” and though he doesn’t know where he’ll end up going, you can feel, for once, that he has hope.
Recommended if you like: stoner comedy, cop shows that pretend not to be cop shows, dick jokes, the most accessible works of notoriously inscrutable authors, twisty plotlines, absurd naming conventions, Marxism but in a satirical way, brand-directed outbursts like this gorgeous tweet:
Not recommended if you like: righteous earnest heroes, feeling like every detail has a clear purpose, cops generally, Marxism (or anything) taken very seriously, Sam Anderson’s tastes.
p.s.: It is a key subscriber’s birthday! Happy birthday, Mom :)
p.postscript: Why did I choose to read this book, when there’s such a breadth of Pynchon between it and Gravity’s Rainbow? (which I have read one and one half-aborted times, thank you very much.) Honestly, because it is the current undertaking of Inherent Cast, née Infinite Cast, which was a podcast where a married couple read Infinite Jest together and is now a podcast where they do that with Inherent Vice. I really like it, probably because I really like Infinite Jest (which I’ve read two or three times, depending on whether you count listening to the podcast, eyeroll eyeroll yesiknow). It’s kind of like an audiobook but somehow less zone-out-able, and there’s useful discussion in a way that I swear is totally unpretentious. If you’re Infinite Jest-curious but hesitant to commit, I highly recommend.
PPPloanscript: To tie it all together, Tex Watson, a prorector (or, essentially, grad student of tennis) and very minor character in Infinite Jest, shares a name with one of the Manson Family murderers. Because California lifted its death penalty around the time of Inherent Vice (early 1970s), he’s still alive today.
px4script: I promise I won’t write about a white man writing about Los Angeles next time. (It’ll probably be an Asian woman writing about San Francisco…)