Here’s my confession: even though I am an English major with an abiding interest in both contemporary American lit and the postmodern movement (as if there is any difference between the two—or “differance,” if you can rock with the double entendre pun-within-a-pun), I seriously just can’t stand Thomas Pynchon. Is that okay? Am I just not as smart as I thought I was? Why do I just simply think that his work is not all that funny, interesting, or elucidating? 

So here’s the pomo shtick of this piece—I was supposed to orchestrate some kind of “Pynchonalia”-soaked pas de deux between a book review of the author’s new, supposedly “self-consciously-non-literary” work Inherent Vice, and our contemporary postmodern culture of conspiracy and areality. I’ve been reading Pynchon’s breakout novel V. for a while now, I don’t know, maybe two weeks off and on, and I fucking hate it. Trusssst me, I’ve tried to like it, I really have. But it’s boring. It’s profoundly unprofound. It doesn’t shake its proverbial fists at, well, any one of the myriad social, psychic, emotional, or psychological burdens of its era in any meaningful way. The characters are cloyingly silly and the plot—or at least however much I forced myself to take in—is at once neither byzantine enough to be merely a rabbit’s warren self-consciously hiding a lack, inability, dysfunctionality, or simulacrum of "meaning"; nor concise enough to be a contemporary but plot-driven literary artifact that makes a real hard-hitting statement. So guess what, Thomas Pynchon, you shadowy, disembodied, faceless literary demon and acclaimed writer of specious pabulum: I’m not fucking reading your new book.

That means, then, that I’m not writing a review of Inherent Vice for my college magazine, but instead, a nonreview. A performance of a review; an angered sideways glare at the author's prosaic taste—his overweight protagonists, pointless alligators in sewers, goofy sex scenes. But of course, maybe it all makes sense in the end, a part of V.  that I have not gotten to and probably never will. Maybe I’m just retarded and should immediately change my major to something that doesn’t involve Pynchon's intimidating oeuvre. Anthropology, maybe? Does that sound good? Happy now, Tommy? But I think that that might be just the point: does Thomas Pynchon want to make honest people feel stupid, and posers feel as if they are hip to some conspiratorially archaic literary secret?

From what I’ve read in the New York Times, Inherent Vice is a “non-serious”—what does that mean?!—novel, set in 1970’s Southern California, about a pot-smoking detective and his various hijinks. It’s kind of like, uh, a conspiracy, I guess, the thing I liked best (if not the only thing I liked) about the only Pynchon book I’ve finished cover-to-cover, The Crying of Lot 49. That novel, of course, is very short: a mere 151 pages meaning that it gets to the point in a way that V. does not, but ought to (for the record, I’m going to give Gravity’s Rainbow a fair shot…after my vacated literary confidence returns to me).

So here’s my real point, the non-self-deprecating one at least: I have a hunch that Inherent Vice is no less serious than any other Thomas Pynchon novel. I mean, come on, since when does a writer, deemed by society to be so fabulously brilliant, just suddenly decide “well, ladies and gentlemen, guess I’m just about done writing that serious stuff now, so, uh, think I’ll just go ahead and a write a regular ol’ detective book”? Maybe there’s nothing sacred about who’s a literary legend and who’s a joke—isn’t that a postmodern idea anyway? And if, as the critics claim and the Dartmouth profs profess, Thomas Pynchon is such a staunch postmodernist (can postmodernists be staunch about anything though?) wouldn’t he, on top of it all, agree that brilliance is probably just randomly, chaotically, and arbitrarily assigned by society? Is that the point of this piece? Tell my Editor-in-Chief that for now I’m just not reading Inherent Vice. I’ll write my own novel and hope that some critic arbitrarily decides that it’s as “brilliant” as V…but just between you and me, it won’t be. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.