About This Book
Thomas Pynchon writing a stoner noir detective novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s sounds like a premise someone invented as a joke, and yet Inherent Vice is one of the most genuinely pleasurable reading experiences I have had. Doc Sportello is a private investigator operating in the foggy borderland between the counterculture and straight society, and the case he stumbles into is less important than the mood it creates: an elegiac, paranoid, deeply funny meditation on what happened to the dream of the 1960s. It reads like Chandler filtered through Kerouac, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
Pynchon's stoned elegy for the sixties pairs beautifully with Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which captures the earlier, more innocent version of the same countercultural energy that Doc Sportello mourns.