Sep 03 2009
California Über Alles
The hippies won’t come back, you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!
Dead Kennedys, California Über Alles
Some quick reviews. In my (very little) off-time this summer I managed to pick through a few non-work books, including a little bout of California noir in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere and, of course, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Reading the two more or less together in the space of a week made for both a nice contrast and a nice focus on the genre, though trying to peg Pynchon on genre is always going to be a little wonky. I liked The Big Nowhere, and I always find Ellroy just eminently readable. There’s also something deeply attractive about the counterfactual method that runs throughout Ellroy’s books: pick a hazy actual historical crime and build an utterly corrupt and twisted explanation for it, walking some interesting characters through the process. In The Black Dahlia, obviously, it’s the Elizabeth Short case. In The Big Nowhere, it’s the Sleepy Lagoon case. I’m rarely surprised by such books, but I was surprised by the character of Danny Upshaw, and I think Ellroy handles the character really well.
Pynchon is also focused on a real California crime, though he has no interest in offering alternative theories. Inherent Vice is set in 1970, and what a difference twenty years makes from Ellroy’s Los Angeles. I have to believe that Pynchon and his publisher were playing a bit of a joke by releasing Inherent Vice on August 4 (it’s beach reading!), since the various reviews would inevitably appear in the same newspapers that were commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders (August 8 and 9), and these events permeate the novel like a sinister background, some creepy crawly hum that plays behind the text only to break through here and there, with Pynchon’s protagonist, surfer-hippie detective Doc Sportello, professing a crush on Leslie Van Houten and teasing his homicide detective rival, Bigfoot Bjornsen, for not having been “up on Cielo Drive” with the rest of them. But this is really par for the course for Pynchon – in Gravity’s Rainbow, in Vineland certainly, in Inherent Vice, and in (I might have to argue another time) Against the Day – always with an eye toward the collapse of the 60’s counterculture, the emergence of a control society, and he manages to do it in an oddly non-nostalgic way. Something flashed and was gone, and while Pynchon’s going to remain faithful to that event (like Dick with Valis), he’s always working through the process of its disappearance, how fear – dread even – inundates an entire culture and becomes its engine. Classic noir, and I think Ellroy is just a master at this, certainly runs on shady networks, but its always a question of struggle, not fear. And if that’s the switch, there’s no better place to go than Los Angeles in 1970, as the fear generated in early August of the previous year became a national spectacle, a lesson in the new form of life.
One gets the sense reading Inherent Vice that Doc Sportello is telling the tale himself, maybe in the present. The narrator slips into Sportello-like verbal tics, like ending sentences with “and so forth,” and you don’t get the long, contemplative sentences that appear in Gravity’s Rainbow or Against the Day – except at the end, the last few paragraphs (which sketch, incidentally, as beautiful a set of images as you see in any Pynchon). The primary narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow never slips into Slothropisms, like using the word “that” before a place name (that Berlin, that London, and – hilariously – that the Hague), but in Inherent Vice you get just that, and so forth. But if fear is the engine, you get laughter and detachment as the counterforce. Inherent Vice is an incredibly funny book, maybe in the way Vineland sought to be funny, or in the way Gravity’s Rainbow (and, for my money, Mason & Dixon) actually was. The big joke that all the reviews note is that the detective is a stoner who forgets pretty much what he’s doing repeatedly throughout the book, but that’s the detachment side. Far more interesting is that the narrator seems to mostly remember the funny parts, even as the fear is pumped out by the gallon.
Thanks for this, getting ready to tackle the Pynchon. Spent the summer reading Raymond Chandler, so turning to the Inherent Vice next week should be cool.
yeah Chuck, this is kinda a slimmed down and maybe shitty review, but I didn’t have time to do the long version. I’d be interested to hear what you think of Inherent Vice, especially after a summer of Chandler. In some ways, it’s pretty clear that Pynchon is gunning for the form specifically, though I didn’t really get into that. It’s not “How can there be poetry after Auschwitz?” so much as it’s “How can there be noir after Manson?” (i.e., that the formal characteristics of noir are precisely what’s *impossible* in the new configuration). Which is to say, the gumshoe is replaced by the cop, loose cannon or otherwise (this is one of the more remarked upon pieces of dialogue in Inherent Vice), but also, corruption is replaced by sociopathology, intricate politics by the grandiose and nonsensical plot, the pulp noir by pulp true crime. The reviews I’ve read have all treated the Manson references as historical atmosphere, but I think they really go to the heart of Pynchon’s project here. Let me know what you think with a follow up comment, for sure.
I noticed two news items the day after I finally began reading Inherent Vice: Roman Polanski had been arrested and Jerry Brown was leading Republican challengers in early polls of the California Governor’s race. Priceless.
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and was surprised at just how closely it followed the genre’s conventions as Chandler established them (or, rather, how closely it followed Chandler’s californication of Hammett’s conventions). Though of course Pynchon invests the conventions with a different feel, pushing them almost to the breaking point. There’s the usual opening scene with a woman asking for help, though instead of the mysterious hard-boiled dame or the faux naivete of a stranger, we get Doc’s ex. The same relentless logic of “and…and…and” in which the detective is constantly on the move and presented with the next encounter or clue, only in this case that logic seems more random and the plot even more convoluted and peopled. We have the moments of theorizing and self-reflection, only here the detective is less confident and hard-boiled, more hazy and passive. And while there is some resolution, we don’t get the kind of payoff one gets used to in Chandler and others. Instead, the possibility of a much larger conspiracy is left out there, either the figment of our paranoid imagination or a very real indication of a changing landscape.
I agree with all you’ve written about the novel. The Manson murders are crucial to the story, and the novel offers a textbook account of the emergence of a control society. And yes, Doc’s forgetfulness and humor seem a surprisingly productive means of responding to the cultural changes overtaking his world.