equipoise. An argument can be made that this novel’s twisted plot is simply the product of Sportello’s hopelessly twisted and drug-addled brain. By all accounts, Sportello is a generally lazy, irresponsible slacker who prefers to spend time with other misfits in a drugged haze. His career, what there is of it, exists largely as an afterthought. However, as enticing as this explanation may seem, it ignores Pynchon’s more serious metaphysical inclinations to see life, even at its most banal, as a condition of deep confusion and irresolvable puzzles. Pynchon consistently conjectures about parallel worlds, temporal dislocation, and a complexity to existence that is hidden under the veils of social orthodoxy and convention.

What any summary of a Pynchon novel cannot convey is the bevy of eccentric and oddball characters that people his fiction. Pynchon has always reveled in presenting characters who exist on society’s fringes and fritter away time with absurd obsessions. Doc Sportello is a perfect case in point, being a bright man who has squandered his intellect with too many drugs, bad fast food, and television. Bigfoot Bjornsen, his adversary and professional critic, is a cynical cop who works as a shill for a real-estate mogul and turns over the messy labor of detection to a private investigator he would happily frame and send to prison. Mickey Wolfmann is a conniving real-estate speculator, a possibly mob-connected criminal, and an ethically reformed businessman who wants to create free housing for the needy and return all his ill-gotten profits as a result of an attack of conscience.

As he has in each of his other fictions, Pynchon returns to a practice that has amused his fans and exasperated scholars. His characters sport an assemblage of silly namesSauncho Smilax, Jason Velveeta, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, FBI agents Flatweed and Borderline, Zigzag Twong, Trillium Fortnight, and Denis (“whose name everybody pronounced to rhyme with ’penis’”). Such names, seemingly chosen for comic effect, defy serious significance, though readers have often attempted to find some logic in these cognomen. Most likely, Pynchon is simply rebelling against the traditional practice of creating either realistic names or identifications that suggest some essence of the character.

As also occurs in Pynchon’s other novels, characters flit in and out of the narrative, sometimes disappearing for scores of pages, only to reappear later, sometimes vanishing from the text altogether. As often as they advance the plot, deepen the mystery, or add some local color, they just as often have no apparent purpose other than to crowd the story with an amusing density and act as postmodern alternatives to Victorian fictions’ sense of social complexity. One of the faults of Inherent Vice, however, arises from the sheer abundance of its characters: The novel lacks much indication of who is most important and why, and its character overload will remind fans of the author’s endless teasing in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), where the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is overwhelmed by experiences that portend too much meaning and too little pattern.

The characteristic Pynchon theme of entropy also finds expression here. The author sees entropy as the condition in the universe through which originality and energy gradually dissipate and create an atmosphere of lifelessness and conformity. The Crying of Lot 49 also introduces the theory of communicative entropy, a condition whereby increases in information create only confusion, and in Inherent Vice not only is there deliberate verbal obfuscation but also characters frequently speak at cross-purposes to one another. Sportello often cannot comprehend what others tell him, and his mind races to follow clues and decipher explanations as events chaotically crowd together.

The fact that Pynchon returns once more in this novel to the late 1960’s underscores his conviction that a period of such considerable social, political, and economic potential dissolved into muddle and complacency in the 1970’s. Hovering over much of the novel’s atmosphere are the Manson killings, which are referred to repeatedly. The message seems to be that Sportello’s stoner acceptance and laissez-faire attitude have devolved into a culture of homicide and exploitation.

When Wolfmann announces that he intends to donate all his guilt-inducing wealth to the disadvantaged, he is abducted by the FBI, deprogrammed, and liberated only once he returns to his former life. Another analogue for the novel’s attitude about the United States and its decline into chaos and insensitivity comes in the various discussions characters have about Lemuria, an island believed to have existed in the Pacific at roughly the same time as Atlantis and that disappeared in the same cataclysm as that island. Lemurians believe the island continent was an eden of peace and tolerance destroyed by scientific rationalism.

Another of Pynchon’s long-standing obsessions is the belief that conspiracies of all types abound and that hidden forces control individual lives and frustrate originality and freedom. The line between coincidence or misapprehension and conspiracy is thin, and Sportello constantly wonders if he has stumbled on some intricate plot, is simply too stoned, or has meandered into a happenstance that appears to reveal hidden connections. The best example of a conspiracy that may be nothing more than urban legend is the Golden Fang. Doc is warned to beware of the Fang in a cryptic note, but when he tries to discern its meaning, he discovers one confusing explanation after another. The Fang is either a dope-smuggling schooner, an office complex, a drug rehabilitation center for the wealthy, a drug cartel, or a tax dodge for a group of dentists.

As a result of the Golden Fang, corrupt cops and FBI agents, and the possibility of more Mansonites lurking in the shadows, Sportello and a number of the characters experience a free-floating paranoia. He initially regards paranoia as “a tool of the trade, it points you in directions you might not have seen to go.” However as the case progresses and the plots within plots grow more dense, he wonders if all the disparate threads of the investigation are actually connected and becomes increasingly uneasy: “Doc felt a suspicion growing, paranoid as the rapid heartbeat of a midnight awakening.” For Pynchon, the old adage holds true, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

Inherent Vice is an amusing, often clever pastiche of Raymond Chandler and the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski (1998), but in the end it is not terribly original. Rumor has it that the novel has been optioned for a film production, and certainly of any of Pynchon’s books this seems the most accessible to a mass audience. While Pynchon still retains his ability to capture the range of high and low culture and write devilishly allusive prose, however, this is far from his best work.