Literary mastermind Thomas Pynchon has a new book out this week, only the seventh novel in his 45-year career. Clocking in at a slim 416 pages, the hardboiled noir Inherent Vice is being marketed as Pynchon’s “most accessible” book yet, but don’t count on anything so gauche as a straightforward narrative from the king of postmodern prose.
Taking place just after the cold conclusion to those free-loving 1960s, Pynchon’s heavily influenced P.I. Doc Sportello leads us through the paranoid haze of beach-side L.A. culture, crossing paths with a motley crew of oddball characters including “surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.” Yep, sounds like Pynchon. Check out this online commercial for the book, narrated by the enigmatic author himself:
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