“God Knows, Few of Us Are Strangers to Moral Ambiguity”: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (review)

 
With his seventh novel, Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon brings his readers back to late 1960s California for the third time—though the story is set in 1970. As with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990), Pynchon is again exploring a particular moment in America when social change seemed simultaneously both possible and impossible. The hippie culture of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll believed a chance had arrived for a new way of organizing American politics and society as the first of the baby boomers came of age, but simultaneously the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon defined an America that would at best tolerate the hippie ethos and then later exploit it for commercial purposes. In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the masterpiece he wrote largely while living in California during the late 60s (and where he sets the final scene of that book), Pynchon records a graffiti slogan from the Weimar period in Germany: “AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN” (Gravity 155), which comments on the naiveté of the Vietnam War era slogan, “Make love not war.” The cultural event haunting Inherent Vice is neither the 1967 “Summer of Love” nor the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music, but rather the aftermath of the Charles Manson Family murders.
 
The Los Angeles of spring 1970 in which Inherent Vice is set is a sprawling mass of freeways and land development concepts. Like Pynchon’s other novels, Inherent Vice is populated by a wide range of characters, often with wacky names. Most are extreme caricatures of dopers, sex fiends, police and other government agents, and paramilitary vigilantes who police LA’s more troublesome individuals, although “troublesome” is a relative category depending on the ideology of the one providing the “policing.” As the novel’s title suggests, there is “vice” inherent in nearly every aspect of LA life, and “moral ambiguity” (7) surrounds nearly every event and every decision the characters make. Although Pynchon’s narrator winks at hippie drug users like Doc and his close friends and at the various sexual encounters between consenting participants, he fills the novel with examples of other activities that could easily be labeled “vice”; the legal definition might be termed more properly “corruption.” Part of the text’s project is for the reader to determine which forms of “vice” truly threaten society at large and which are harmless. The hippie dopers are essentially harmless (only a danger to themselves), but the vast heroin cartel of the multivalent “Golden Fang” needs to be taken down. Given the suspected police and government corruption protecting the cartel, the task falls in large part to Pynchon’s protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello, hippie private investigator, or gumsandal.
 
All Pynchon novels are in some degree “detective” stories, although they tend to be described as quest narratives. Whether it is Herbert Stencil seeking the mysterious lady V., or Oedipa Maas trying to unravel the skein of the Trystero, or Tyrone Slothrop pursuing the Schwarzgerät, or the Traverse brothers’ tracking down their father’s killers, Pynchon has used the mystery plot to give his often sprawling narratives a skeleton—even though the central character, an innocent who stumbles upon seemingly vast conspiracies operating just below the surface of perceived reality (and recorded history), typically fails to solve the mystery in the end. With Inherent Vice Pynchon gives us his first “professional” detective as protagonist; Lew Basnight in Against the Day (2006), a novel that ultimately takes the reader to 1920s Los Angeles and a string of serial killings, and Manny di Presso in Lot 49 were also professionals, but not central characters, and I’m leaving out of this class government agents such as Brock Vond or Hector Zuñiga in Vineland. The detective plot of the novel unfolds more conventionally than any Pynchon text to date—even the trademark paranoia experienced by Doc and others seems to have more logical than fantastic sources. Like his precursors in the hard-boiled detective genre (though Pynchon’s text plays parodically with the genre), Doc often finds he has to make ethical decisions about how to go about his investigations—balancing the moral dimension and legitimacy of each client. In previous novels the protagonists’ moral and ethical dilemmas arise more on the spur of the moment (Dixon turning on the slave trader or Slothrop rescuing der Springer from Soviet agent Tchitcherine), while for Doc it is his stock in trade.
 
Gone in Inherent Vice are the long, convoluted historical insets (whether factual or fictional) that have allowed Pynchon over the years to layer his narratives with contexts that construct an historical depth to his fictional plots. As a result, long time readers of Pynchon might be disappointed and find this text a bit too conventional, a bit too “mainstream,” as other reviewers have said—it is the most potentially filmable Pynchon novel yet. Nonetheless, there are plenty of Pynchon’s tricks to entertain and confound Pynchon readers. As with his other texts, many of the rewards come through rereading, when one has time to savor the clever patches of prose, the multiple intersections of plots, the diverse characters, and the density of pop culture references (Tim Ware’s Wiki page for the novel provides a good starting place for readers needing to verify [or add] references—including audio files for many of the over 100 references to popular music in the text).
 
The book opens with a nod to the style made famous in the LA noir detective fiction of the 1930s and 40s:
 

 

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.
 

(1)

 

But it is not the 30s or 40s, though the “case” Shasta Fay Hepworth, Doc’s ex-girlfriend, brings him—an apparent scam being run by the wife of Shasta’s current lover, Mickey Wolfmann, to gain control of his fortune and real estate empire—has the opening ring of a classic crime fiction. At each turn Doc finds the case spiraling in different directions, yet those various directions often reconnect in a complex plot, a plot that requires the reader’s attention even if the perspective is almost entirely restricted to Doc’s (rather than being told from the multiple perspectives typical in Pynchon’s novels). Most sinister among the plots is the one involving the enigmatic Golden Fang, which on one level appears to be a consortium of dentists with a diversified portfolio of investments (including cocaine distribution), but on another appears to be a cartel of highly connected criminals with a diversified crime portfolio that includes all stages of the heroin trade, including the rehab centers for those trying to kick the habit.

 
Among the various dopers in the text, Coy Harlingen and his wife Hope present the most affecting picture. Coy fakes his own death to break the cycle of his addiction, but the cost of this fake death is an absolute separation from Hope and their daughter Amethyst. Coy, a surf-band saxophone player by trade, becomes a tool of the Golden Fang and of right-wing political groups when in a mistaken effort to reclaim himself and his patriotism he works for them (Them?) in various capacities. Coy embodies the confused morality of the late 60s as he tries to find ways to provide for his family by not being with them. Hope believes Coy is still alive, and asks Doc to track him down. As in Against the Day, Pynchon shows a respect for reconnecting this family, giving them a future together out from under the thumb of the forces that control Coy for much of the novel. The one unambiguous bit of morality in Pynchon’s later fiction centers on the primacy of a family unit, especially when children are involved.
 
Holmes has Lestrade and Poirot has Japp; Sportello has LAPD lieutenant and occasional TV actor Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, “one of America’s true badasses” (202). A staple of detective fiction is the relationship between the detective hero and the representative of the police, who is often a foil that helps reveal the detective’s superior powers of deduction. In Bjornsen, Pynchon has created a foil of much greater complexity than the occasionally bumbling chief inspector (my examples are British rather than American, and it would be useful for a scholar of American detective fiction to explore Bjornsen’s place in this tradition). As Doc’s seeming nemesis, Bjornsen places obstacles in the way of Doc’s investigations and ultimately exploits Doc’s discoveries for his own purposes. Bjornsen is haunted, however, by his own demons—he is not involved in the Manson “case of the century,” and he believes he should be higher in the LAPD hierarchy than he is—but none of his demons is more compelling than his desire to avenge the murder of his former partner, which the department wants to cover up because it would threaten one of their prime snitches (the “snitch” culture outlined in Vineland is in full force in Inherent Vice). Although on the surface Doc and Bjornsen have a mutual antagonism, Pynchon signals with the label “badass” (a character category he valorizes in the essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” [1984]) that there may be more to “Bigfoot” than meets the eye. With each new action, the reader’s sense of Bjornsen’s moral register slides positively or negatively, making his position chronically ambiguous. If Pynchon wants to develop a series of Doc Sportello novels, the interplay between Doc and Bjornsen presents fertile ground for development.
 
Although Doc has a police foil in Bjornsen, he lacks a Watson. In a novel that at times reads like a Cheech & Chong film script, it is a bit surprising that Doc is essentially a loner in his investigations (occasionally companions tag along, but mostly they provide comic relief rather than substantive assistance). On the other hand, the faithful companion trope in detective fiction is often a device that allows a first-person narrator to tell the story of the case and to display the brilliance of the detective from a vantage point of one who can express proper amazement at his deductions. Such a narrator would have, however, made it harder to maintain the moral ambiguity of the text; the reader would expect this sort of narrator to comment on the struggle between morality and vice. Inherent Vice would have been an opportunity for Pynchon to produce a novel in the first person, but maybe Doc is just too habitually stoned to be a reliable teller of his own tale. On the other hand, Pynchon does not take full advantage of his narrator’s omniscience—as he has in his previous fiction—to take the reader on wild associative digressions into arcane histories and counter histories. There still is the regular Pynchon sensibility in this text that “everything is connected” (108), and it won’t be surprising if Inherent Vice contains many more connected layers operating beneath the surface of this seemingly accessible detective fiction.
 
Yet that same accessibility masks the “moral ambiguity” that permeates Inherent Vice. Although Pynchon has always dabbled in such ambiguity, he has also deployed unambiguous villains (IG Farben, Scarsdale Vibe, Brock Vond) throughout his fiction—the individual character villains are usually metonymies for large institutional villains. Although a clear “villain” eventually emerges from the convolution of plots in the novel, it is neither a character nor a plot the reader has been necessarily following from the start. In Pynchon’s earlier novels the “villain” is a subject of narrative exposition that clues in the reader long before the protagonist’s paranoia merges with fact. This time the villain deserving an act of retribution emerges from the detection that organizes Doc’s movement through the various plots constituting LA in 1970. The “moral ambiguity” of the novel is not so simply located in specific characters or entities like the Golden Fang; instead, it is the entire milieu of LA that has slipped its moral moorings and seems adrift, waiting for next big wave to roll in off the Pacific. The reader is left to determine his or her own moral register for the fictional world of Inherent Vice, and like Doc in the end, we find ourselves driving in the fog at night, looking for that existential exit off the seemingly endless freeway.