At the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy 70’s funny serious meta-noir, is a mystery greater than the plot presented. As revealed by Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (wonderful screenplay by Robert Towne) and Raymond Chandler’s every lit only by streetlight foray into Los Angeles and its environs, there is a river of turpitude flowing beneath the shiny hard gloss of Southern California. Whereas the earlier works dealt with that river seeping up through the cracks into the lives of individuals, Pynchon’s INHERENCT VICE places his plot just after a moment where such a crack became a seismic fault line—Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders. Barely addressed during the actual novel, this event was personal to Los Angeles in a way that the other death knells of sixties idealism were not. The clinical savagery of the murders by the blindly obedient seemingly harmless followers of a charismatic madman, stunned and horrified the public beyond startled head shaking and dismay. The murders crept down into the core of who we thought we were and many never quite saw the world the same again. (Can we trust authority to protect us—does authority even care?) Onto this unsettled plain, come the quirky goofballs and malevolent forces of Pynchon’s world. A music mogul’s disappearance seems to be the trigger of events, but as Pynchon unfolds his tale gradually and gracefully you realize that all the events of his story are just aftermath. We are only playing catch up to events that unfold without our knowledge and beyond our power and will likely escape our understanding when we come upon them. Pynchon also brings in one of his favorite recurring themes, identity. There are people undercover, people finding out who they are or were, people leading double lives and people who are so slightly connected to the world that they may be said to not to exist at all. Doc Sportello, Pynchon’s names are always marvelous, the PI that leads the reader through the tale is easy to dismiss as a drugged out hippie but he will grow in your esteem and affection while the music mogul at the center of the mystery does a character 180….and then another. He remains almost little more than a shadow figure that the other characters try to mold into the image they want to see. In the midst of this are the things we choose to distract ourselves with sex, drugs, rock n’ roll and television and munchies. Mix in Pynchon’s usual array of unusual characters who seldom do quite what you expect them to do for reasons you won’t see coming and what I have presented as a heavy and ominous tome reads more like an ingenious PI story rolled up in a pothead’s lark. The humor is often sly, sometimes bawdy and lewd but the trip always rewarding. An amusing romp amidst the tombstones of our culture.