Far From Brooklyn

Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon

I think this must be the first time I ever bought a book based on an ad – a brief video ad, of all things, on YouTube.

I was never a hardcore Pynchon fan. In fact, I wasn’t a fan at all. I couldn’t get through “V” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The one book I did finish, “The Crying of Lot 49, was merely a novella.

But I assumed the fault was more mine than his.  Similar, let’s say, to the relationship I have with Henry James: I have to take others’ word that James is a genius because I find him too insufferably boring to actually read.

"Insufferable” is just the word I would apply to Pynchon: His relentless wordplay, his sophomoric sense of humor, his lurching plots, his drug references, his puerile conspiracy theories. His voice was like ants in my eardrums.  Or hamsters. Something I didn’t want in my eardrums, in any case.

And then along comes “Inherent Vice” and its brilliant little ad on YouTube, featuring a gravel-voiced narrator (could it be the Master himself, reading aloud???) and a promising noirish premise of a gumshoe, “or gumsandal,” doing business in the alternating brightness and darkness of early ‘70s Los Angeles.

I thought, “Maybe this is it, the Pynchon book that wins me over.”  God knows the ad won me over.  I went down to Small World on Venice Beach right away and bought me a full-priced hardcover – the last one they had, I think. (Pynchonwould be big in Venice.)

I was psyched.  I was thinking maybe this would be as good as Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” – also a noirish potboiler with a literary pedigree that just so happens to be set in a beachside environment (Provincetown, not Los Angeles).  Having loved “Tough Guys” for a long time, I was very much prepared to love “Inherent Vice,” too.

But I didn’t.

It was like ants in my eardrums.  Or hamsters.  Or whatever.

Something I didn’t want in my eardrums.