The Bigger Lebowski

It's L.A. circa 1970, and everyone's running scared. The hippie chick who used to wear the Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt has disappeared, and the man on the trail is private eye Doc Sportello, who lives on weed and pizza and rock & roll, plus the motto "Never smoke nothing's been grown in a combat zone." That's just the start of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, a shaggy-dog stoner noir in the style of The Big Lebowski. The cops are out to bust every longhair they can find, with the media cartoon Charles Manson (not even a real murderer!) as an excuse. Doc tangles with a global heroin network called the Golden Fang. There's a massage parlor called Chick Planet that offers a Pussy Eaters Special for $14.95. Doc runs into Panthers, neo-Nazis, gurus, grifters, Jesus-freak surfers and a police branch called the P-DIDdies, meaning "Public Disorder Intelligence Division." As Doc notes, "The world had just been disassembled, anybody here could be working any hustle you could think of, and it was long past time to be, as Shaggy would say, gettin' out of here, Scoob."

Inherent Vice is the funniest book Pynchon has written. It's also a crazed and majestic summary of everything that makes him a uniquely huge American voice. It has the moral fury that's fueled his work from the start — his ferociously batshit compassion for America and the lost tribes who wander through it. A master of pastiche, Pynchon is working this time in the mode of the hard-boiled detective novel à la Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, although it's more like a hard-boiled egg scrambled during a late-night munchies attack — it's as if he watched Lebowski one night and said, "Fuck, I can do that with one hand tied behind my back."

Inherent Vice is full of his favorite kind of Americans, too: transcendental slackers whose fuck-it-all laziness and innate decency would give them an inside line on satori if it wasn't such hard work. Nonetheless, they are people who take the motto "Don't tread on me" seriously but think it means the same thing as "Hey, you, get off of my cloud."

Pynchon savors the boilerplate film-noir tough-guy patter ("Big mistake, pal. Fact is, your life ain't long enough to make a bigger one") and teen-moron jokes (interrogated by the cops, Doc asks them, "Can I be frank for a minute?" — and then starts singing "Fly Me to the Moon"), all rushing by at breakneck speed. But the mood is after-hours stoner-outlaw dread. Nixon's the president, Reagan's the governor, free love has become a scam, and the stoners have turned to hard drugs. As Doc notes grimly, "Life in psychedelic-Sixties L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave a joint at against too much trust, and the Seventies were looking no more promising."