Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
What Happened at Gordita Beach?
By Michael Wood
Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 369 pp., $27.95
Inherent Vice doesn't look like a historical novel. It looks like a shaggy detective story parodied by Thomas Pynchon, or perhaps like a moderately baggy Thomas Pynchon novel parodied by a devotee of the detective story. But it recreates a particular piece of the American past in considerable if often hallucinatory detail, and it wonders what happened to those days, what they meant, and what went with them when they vanished. The novel's chief character, thinking of recurring sexual desire but encompassing much more, wonders whether it ever ends. The narrator answers, 'Of course it does. It did.'
Review, 3247 words
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