I was as excited as I'd probably ever been for a new book release on August 4th, in anticipation of one of my favorite writer's new books, called Inherent Vice. This is Thomas Pynchon's version of a PI/detective story, and I must say that it's probably as linearly written and accessible as anything he's ever written. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
On Tuesday the 4th, I took some books with me to donate to the Housing Works bookstore, a very cool place that depends entirely on donations and volunteers to keep in business. They raise money for housing for HIV-positive and AIDS afflicted people. We had some books that we needed to excise from our library for purposes of space and an accidental over-estimation of their relative importance.
Pynchon's Inherent Vice was being released that day, and I wasn't sure if I was going to go buy it, despite how excited I was over its release. It wasn't going to be at Housing Works (since they run on donation only). As I was walking out of the bookstore, I stopped momentarily at the fifty-cent cart; a cart that has many stacks of books each for only fifty-cents. Glancing around I found something, namely a paperback edition of Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden. I thumbed through it and soon learned that it was Sagan's personal research project into the evolution of human intelligence and the brain. I read about forty or so pages on the way home from the bookstore, content to leave the Pynchon hardback for a later time. The price came to fifty-four cents, with tax.
The next day, Wednesday, I stopped by the market to say hi to Marc and Tom. The dairy stand is directly across from Barnes&Nobles. They had a problem with the refrigerator truck, and I was there, so I went to work for a while as they got control of the issue (mountains of ice). I was awarded for my service with Inherent Vice. It was on some sort of sale, a promotional thing for new releases, and after taxes the charge came out $24.42. Two books in two days, by two of my favorite writers (do yourself a favor and read Sagan's Cosmos; it'll change your life), for less than twenty-five bucks total.
Inherent Vice follows a 5'3" PI, Doc Sportello, around LA in 1969, with Pynchon's characteristic drug use, wild sex acts, and weird/magical paranoiac conspiracies. It was mentioned in a review relayed to me that it was reminiscent of The Big Lebowski, and at some level the comparison is apt. One difference is the time period (1969 vs 1991), while another is one stars The Dude, an out-of-work pot-smoking bowling enthusiast and the other stars Doc, a pot-smoking hippie-freak who's also a licensed investigator. The endless driving around LA is the same, for sure, and the dense entanglements of the plotlines are very similar, but you'd expect nothing less from Pynchon (and probably the Cohens as well).
To me, having last read Pynchon's Vineland, Inherent Vice almost seems like it's an untold story from that book's flashbacks, like you almost expect to see Zoyd or the 24 fps revolutionaries in cameos. In fact, the minor Scott Oof is more prominent here in IV.
I hope for those of you who don't care about or know about these writers that I haven't bored the crap out of you. I'd suggest checking both of them out.
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