Although it’s been many years since I read it, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read a few other books of his and generally enjoy the psychedelic, conspiratorial, convoluted style. Inherent Vice is absolutely in this vein, but by the end I was thoroughly bored and wondering what the meandering point was supposed to be.
The story follows Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead hippy private investigator who seems to get hired by everyone in town but never paid for anything. The place is southern CA and the time is the sixties. The plot revolves around a disappearance, some murders, a crooked cop, a mysterious organization called the Gold Fang and a schooner by the same name that may be smuggling drugs, and random characters like a sax player who is supposed to be dead but is in fact tangled up in some syndicates and crooked cops, various sexpots, drugheads, land developers, FBI agents and district attorneys, casino owners, pimps and massage parlor workers, psychiatric patients, runaways, and computer geeks.
Doc spends the whole book driving around the LA area, with a side trip to Vegas, smoking staggering amounts of dope, having randy sex, crossing paths with everyone who crosses paths with everyone else, and trying to ferret out various conspiracies that hang together in nonsensical fashion. The books ends with more driving, more dope, and some loose resolutions to the copious plotlines Pynchon starts and stops at his whim.
The book does not have an overriding mystery, more like a lot of half-baked ones, and Doc spends a not insignificant amount of time calling things groovy and smoking doobies. Frankly, the end of the book couldn’t have come soon enough, I just didn’t enjoy the wacky hijinks nor the racist colorful commentary. I took one note while reading: “This fucking book is getting impossible.” That pretty much sums it up.