Pynchon's

If finally Inherent Vice is somewhat less satisfying than Pynchon's other two California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention V and Gravity's Rainbow, I would identify its most serious flaw as a kind of sentimentality about the vanished hippie world it evokes.

What's Going On? 2010

Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice was an attempt to "capture" the late 1960s in Los Angeles, but while it does surround the period in an idyllic (and marijuna-produced) haze, at the same it shows the idyll to be inherently unstable, setting the conditions of its own dispersement.

May 2010 2010

If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, bothfor Doc and for the reader.

What's Going On? 2010

Ultimately Pynchon's idiosyncratic appropriation of the "novel of detection" is much more satisfying than Johnson's straight-faced mimicry of the "noir" crime story.

What's Going On? 2010

As many reviewers of Inherent Vice correctly pointed out, Pynchon's fiction has long incorporated the mystery plot as its essential narrative device, with characters such as Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop taking on the role of "detective."

What's Going On? 2010

Perhaps it has been lurking in Pynchon's work all along, but the wistful tone of innocence lost pervades this novel, and a little too obviously for my taste.

What's Going On? 2010

(Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.)

What's Going On? 2010

Within the last year, both Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon, each certifiably qualified to be regarded as serious novelists, have published novels that imitate or burlesque crime fiction, Johnson's Nobody Move and Pynchon's Inherent Vice.

What's Going On? 2010

Pynchon's best work is above all funny, and the most unfortunate consequence of the scholarly attention Pynchon's fiction hasgathered over the years is that too much emphasis has been put on "paranoia" and "entropy" and other weighty matters, obscuring the fundamental fact that Pynchon is in the line of great American literary comedians.

What's Going On? 2010

There is some truth to such an interpretation, of course, but I don't finally think that Pynchon's novel is a burlesque of the detective novel and nothing more.

What's Going On? 2010