I didn’t like this book. Not at all and I’m hugely disappointed.

Going in, Inherent Vice felt like something that I should love – a noir detective story set at the end of the 60’s in South California. I should have lapped it up. But I didn’t. It actually made me feel tired when reading it – not a good review for a thriller.

I’ve never read any of Mr Pynchon’s books before and I doubt I’ll be reading another. I struggled to get to the end of this one. It was tough going. It should have been textbook stuff: Grizzly private eye, femme fatale, conspiracies, murder… But Pynchon’s style, tone and story-telling are so heavy handed and tricksy that one soon tires of the plot and the characters. Not even the odd amusing line or bright metaphor can pull you back. This should have been a book about light and shade, about the tough shell of life and the soft underbelly of existence. It should have revealed the 60’s era of freedom and experimentation for what it really was, but instead it’s head-scratchingly dull and confusing.

This is a novel that lumbers under the weight of it’s own concept. Setting a noir thriller in the fudgy, selfish, self-centred late days of the 60’s counter-culture is a great idea for a novel. Unfortunately this isn’t that novel. For a start, Pynchon has too many characters: a revolving door of Wodehousesian-names (Ensenada Slim, Flaco the Bad, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Petunia Leeway, Jason Velveeta, Scott Oof ) race in and back out again, and I found myself turning back pages to double-check who-was-who. Most of them weren’t even integral to the plot so just served as extra floss on an already overcrowded stage.

This confusion was not aided by having the main character called “Doc” and an important secondary character “the Doctor”.  Surely someone at the publishers ought to have called this one out?

And a plot that attempts to juggle this amount of characters is always going to be too complicated. Complex plots can be a good thing, especially in modern thrillers, but the writer needs to reign himself in and remember that just because he knows what’s happening, it doesn’t mean that his readers will. He can have fun, but not at their expense. After about fifty or so pages, everything just merged into one muddy background.

What more, I found myself not caring about what was going to happen (or whodunit) and certainly not giving a hoot about the amount of drugs and free love on show. This appears to be Pynchon’s cornerstone of his narrative – it’s a book about the 60s after all… But it isn’t big and it isn’t clever. And it’s certainly not original.

Not one of the characters is remotely likeable, not even the protagonist. Without a detective to root for and hold the whole thing together, any mystery or thriller is doomed to fail. We need a hero to cheer for, to connect with, to want to win. In Raymond Chandler’s essay on detective fiction, he says that the best fiction detective needs to be a white knight; he can be a loner and he can be outside of society, but he must be a moral man, a man who walks the mean streets “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” I feel Pynchon should have been aware of and taken heed to these words.

Later this year, a movie version of this book is due for release, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I’m not a huge fan of his work, but wait with interest to see what he does with this source material. Maybe a film adaptation is what it needs. For once I hope that the film is nothing like the book.