Pineapple Expressionism

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

2009, Penguin Press

For an author I have never heretofore successfully read, Thomas Pynchon and I have an incredibly long relationship. The first time Thomas Pynchon and I crossed paths was during college. I had been going through a phase where things like the Pulitzer Prize called me like a siren to certain ruin.

This impulse I have towards awards and lists and bests of is one I have never been able to successfully shake; every year, I still compulsively load and re-load the Pulitzer website waiting to see what book has won the award so I can be the first to request it from the library. Part of this fascination comes from, I think, an anthropological/cultural bent I have. That is, I find it interesting why books are successful when they are and what the laudatory results have to say about the culture from where they come. Awards are a historical record of not so much taste as an idea of taste. The books chosen for these awards seem to present as evidence of the zeitgeist, if nothing else.

A perfect example of this concept is Thomas Pynchon's breakthrough novel Gravity's Rainbow. When the book was published in 1974, the jury that recommends novels to the Pulitzer board unanimously recommended Pynchon's 800-some-odd-page postmodern opus as the winner of that year's award for fiction.

The jury, which is typically small, merely recommends titles for the award, it does not bestow the award itself; this is the board's job. The board, in this case, rejected the jury's recommendation, accusing Pynchon's writing of density and obscenity. That year, no award was given.

Naturally curious about this book, I took it out from the library and labored (and I mean labored) through about a hundred of its pages of the course of several weeks. The writing was not bad, just difficult to navigate. As I have a tendency to do with significantly long works of fiction (like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), I simply ran out of library renewals and returned it unfinished and unmotivated to check it out again.

A year or two later, Pynchon published the equally long Against the Day, which I took out from the library with the intent of doing penance for my aborted Gravity's Rainbow adventure. I took it with me to jury duty with no alternate reading material (I usually bring two books and a magazine to ensure a wealth of options) as though to force myself through its pages. After about two hundred of them, I was dismissed and long story short returned the book again unread (though my memory of those two hundred pages is not unpleasant).

Finally I discovered The Crying of Lot 49, which was significantly more manageable in size. Scared of by the alarmingly dense prose, I abandoned that too.

So it was with considerable determination to make up for past wrongs that I set down to begin and to actually finish Pynchon's new novel, which I had read in a review was "accessible".

Imagine my surprise that Pynchon, whose elliptically plotted novels I abandoned as one might a strangely antagonistic first course at a restaurant you had heard raves about, has written a funny, somewhat simple and, yes, accessible novel that is funnier, and loopier, than I thought it would (have any right to) be.

Inherent Vice is billed as a noir and it is, of sorts. The protagonist is a small-time private eye named Doc Sportello who lives a hippie's life in the fictional Gordita Beach, California in the 1970s.

The narrative revolves around, as most noirs do, a woman (in this case Doc's former flame, Shasta) who presents Doc with a case and then promptly disappears. What follows is a paranoid spiral of organized crime, crooked cops, mysterious disappearances and unlikely reappearances presented through the drug-addled filter of Doc's joint-per-page self medication.

Much of the book veers, as Doc does, off the task at hand and delves into the lives of various colorful characters (neo-Nazi Ethel Mermanites, promiscuous stewardii, various stoners) that have no real relevance to the narrative.

Pages are devoted to these characters and their charmingly inane ramblings but none of these digressions bear relevance on the plot and as such linger ambiguously in one's mind in a manner not unlike Doc's copious drug trips. One is left wondering Did that page-long summary of the Godzilla-meets-Gilligan's-Island television movie actually happen, or was that something I dreamed? for example.

I've heard the book referred to as a "psychedelic noir", which might seem to be an unfortunate pairing considering that noir plots are typically prone to digressions devoted to many topics - sex, red herrings, back story. Doc and his gang's stoner shenanigans (at one point they stare at a package of heroin because it came in a box labeled TV) distract the reader from the narrative, but fortunately provide it a great deal of its punny charm.

The action becomes cartoonishly convoluted to the point where suspension of disbelief (which was never really the point) becomes difficult, much like the similarly structured Pineapple Express or the conclusion of Spike Jonze's Adaptation. The characters grow more and more exaggerated and the action more incredible by the page until the narrative seemingly owes more to the countless noirs and cop dramas it borrows from - and their conventions - than it does any semblance of realism.

One of the more interesting passages in the book reflects on this disconnect between the simultaneously contrived and convoluted narrative and our expectations for narrative sensibility. One of Doc's friend is a regular viewer of a soap opera and summarizes the week's drama as such:

This week – as he updated Doc during lulls – Heather has just confided to Iris her suspicions about the meat loaf, including Julian’s role in switching the contents of the Tabasco bottle. Iris wasn't too surprised, of course, having for the duration of her own marriage to Julian taken turns in the kitchen, so that there remain between these bickering exes literally hundreds of culinary scores yet to be settled. Meanwhile, Vicki and Stephen are still discussing who still owes who five dollars from a pizza delivery weeks ago, in which the dog, Eugene, somehow figures as a key element.

Our expectations of the soap opera are inverted (through either the prism of Doc's stoner haze or the deus-ex-machinations of Pynchon) to present an overwrought portrait of mundane realism.

This passage is, of course, quite funny, but it gets at what I suspect one of Pynchon's motivations is. Inherent Vice seems to poke fun at narrativity and at our desire for fiction to be realistic. By playing with our structural expectations (of plotting, of coherence), Pynchon seems to be emphasizing their relative pointlessness.

Much later in the novel, there is another reference to soap operas as Doc's parents try marijuana for the first time and relate their experience back to their son:

“Well," [his mother says,] "there’s this soap we watch, Another World? but somehow we couldn’t recognize any of the characters, even though we’ve been following them every day, I mean it was still Alice and Rachel and that Ada whom I haven’t trusted since A Summer Place [1959] and everybody, their faces were the same, but the tings they were talking about all meant something different somehow, and meantime I was also having trouble with the colors on the set, and then Oriole brought in chocolate chip cookies and we started eating and couldn’t stop with those...”

It seems to me that Pynchon's fiction acts in much the same way that marijuana does for Doc's parents. That is, Pynchon twists traditional fictional conventions through the carnivalesque funhouse-mirror of his narrative so that characters and themes and setting mean something different, show something different, than they did when we began.

Pynchon's narrative serves, much like expressionistic painting, to distort forms, flatten realistic perspectives and paint the world in, figuratively speaking, broad strokes and bold colors. Expressionism celebrates the drunken, chaotic, ecstatic capabilities of art, as opposed to the fastidiously and fussily ordered, composed, and realistic modes of art.

In stripping his reader of his narrative crutches and thoroughly subverting expectations of character and plot, Pynchon leaves his reader with nothing but the purest enjoyment of a pulpy plot and his alternately zany and dry wit. A wit that casts its gleeful and caustic gaze on the things that drive our everyday activities, whether they be the vicarious dramas of daytime television or the pleasant lulls of afternoons spent on the beach.