Pressestimmen
--Rolling Stone
"The new Pynchon: a beach read and a heartstring puller. It's almost surreal. A"
--Entertainment Weekly
"A Great American Read-a terrific pastiche of California noir, wonderfully amusing throughout (and hard to quote from in a family newspaper because of the frequent use of, uh, colorful spoken language) and a poignant evocation of the last flowering of the '60s, just before everything changed and passed into myth or memory."
--Washington Post
"How pitch-perfect noir can one get?"
--Chicago Tribune
Inherent Vice is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era's end. This, of course, is exactly the kind of layered meaning that readers expect of Pynchon... With Pynchon's brilliance comes readability."
--Los Angeles Times
"Pynchon's prose is so casually vernacular, so deeply in the American grain, you forget that someone composed it. Inherent Vice feels fizzily spontaneous- like a series of jazz solos, scenes, and conversations built around little riffs of language."
--Newsweek
"A deliciously composed dark comedy.......I found myself charmed and pleased with the way Pynchon meets the genre square and fair...Whatever you think of the '60s, or maybe you don't think anything about it, this book may sing to you too."
--NPR, "All Things Considered"
"What Pynchon is after with the prodigal absurdities of Doc's adventures is not really parody, but something larger. They are a way to enter into a time and place of extravagant delusions, innocent freedoms, and an intoxicated (literally) sense of possibility. And to do it without sententiousness, to write in psychedelic colors disciplined by a steel-on-flint intelligence."
--The Boston Globe
"Reading Thomas Pynchon again, one is reminded that fiction can clarify the world-capturing it as it seems to be-and it can also change the world by seeing it new ways. Pynchon is a magician in the second category: He applies language to what we know and all we've missed-giving new shape to both....The book is exuberant, delightfully evocative of its era, and very funny."
--O Magazine
Kurzbeschreibung
It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes 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.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .
Über den Autor
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
ONE
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower–print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T–shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.
"That you, Shasta?"
"Thinks he's hallucinating."
"Just the new package I guess."
They stood in the street light through the kitchen window there'd never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.
"Need your help, Doc."
"You know I have an office now? Just like a day job and everything?"
"I looked in the phone book, almost went over there. But then I thought, better for everybody if this looks like a secret rendezvous."
Okay, nothing romantic tonight. Bummer. But it still might be a paying gig. "Somebody's keepin a close eye?"
"Just spent an hour on surface streets trying to make it look good."
"How about a beer?" He went to the fridge, pulled two cans out of the case he kept inside, handed one to Shasta.
"There's this guy," she was saying.
There would be, but why get emotional? If he had a nickel for every time he'd heard a client start off this way, he could be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him…; "Gentleman of the straightworld persuasion," he beamed.
"Okay, Doc. He's married."
"Some…; money situation."
She shook back hair that wasn't there and raised her eyebrows so what.
Groovy with Doc. "And the wife—she knows about you?"
Shasta nodded. "But she's seeing somebody too. Only it isn't just the usual—they're working together on some creepy little scheme."
"To make off with hubby's fortune, yeah, I think I heard of that happenin once or twice around L.A. And…; you want me to do what, exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight–chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well–known hardon Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did.
They went in the front room and Doc laid down on the couch and Shasta stayed on her feet and sort of drifted around the place.
"Is, they want me in on it," she said. "They think I'm the one who can reach him when he's vulnerable, or as much as he ever gets."
"Bareass and asleep."
"I knew you'd understand."
"You're still trying to figure out if it's right or wrong, Shasta?"
"Worse than that." She drilled him with that gaze he remembered so well. When he remembered. "How much loyalty I owe him."
"I hope you're not asking me. Beyond the usual boilerplate people owe anybody they're fucking steady—"
"Thanks, Dear Abby said about the same thing."
"Groovy. Emotions aside, then, let's look at the money. How much of the rent's he been picking up?"
"All of it." Just for a second, he caught the old narrow–eyed defiant grin.
"Pretty hefty?"
"For Hancock Park."
Doc whistled the title notes from "Can't Buy Me Love," ignoring the look on her face. "You're givin him IOUs for everything, o' course."
"You fucker, if I'd known you were still this bitter—"
"Me? Trying to be professional here, is all. How much were wifey and the b.f. offering to cut you in for?"
Shasta named a sum. Doc had outrun souped-up Rollses full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he'd walked up back alleys east of the L.A. River with nothing but a borrowed 'fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed, and these days had nearly convinced himself all that reckless era was over with, but now he was beginning to feel deeply nervous again. "This…;" carefully now, "this isn't just a couple of X–rated Polaroids, then. Dope planted in the glove compartment, nothin like 'at…;"
Back when, she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn't read at all. Maybe something she'd picked up at acting school. "It isn't what you're thinking, Doc."
"Don't worry, thinking comes later. What else?"
"I'm not sure but it sounds like they want to commit him to some loony bin."
"You mean legally? or a snatch of some kind?"
"Nobody's telling me, Doc, I'm just the bait." Come to think of it, there'd never been this much sorrow in her voice either. "I heard you're seeing somebody downtown?"
Seeing. Well, "Oh, you mean Penny? nice flatland chick, out in search of secret hippie love thrills basically—"
"Also some kind of junior DA in Evelle Younger's shop?"
Doc gave it some thought. "You think somebody there can stop this before it happens?"
"Not too many places I can go with this, Doc."
"Okay, I'll talk to Penny, see what we can see. Your happy couple—they have names, addresses?"
When he heard her older gent's name he said, "This is the same Mickey Wolfmann who's always in the paper? The real–estate big shot?"
"You can't tell anybody about this, Doc."
"Deaf and dumb, part of the job. Any phone numbers you'd like to share?"
She shrugged, scowled, gave him one number. "Try to never use it."
"Groovy, and how do I reach you?"
"You don't. I moved out of the old place, staying where I can anymore, don't ask."
He almost said, "There's room here," which in fact there wasn't, but he'd seen her looking around at everything that hadn't changed, the authentic English Pub Dartboard up on the wagon wheel and the whorehouse swag lamp with the purple psychedelic bulb with the vibrating filament, the collection of model hot rods made entirely of Coors cans, the beach volleyball autographed by Wilt Chamberlain in Day–Glo felt marker, the velvet painting and so forth, with an expression of, you would have to say, distaste.
He walked her down the hill to where she was parked. Weeknights out here weren't too different from weekends, so this end of town was already all ahoot with funseekers, drinkers and surfers screaming in the alleys, dopers out on food errands, flatland guys in for a night of hustling stewardesses, flatland ladies with all–too–grounded day jobs hoping to be mistaken for stewardesses. Uphill and invisible, traffic out on the boulevard to and from the freeway uttered tuneful exhaust...
