Posted on 15 November 2009 by Will O' in Books, The Seventies
If you haven’t seen it already, here’s Thomas Pynchon (as Doc Sportello, the book’s protagonist) reading a blurb about his new book, Inherent Vice. A hoot and hip to the core, it takes place in Manhattan Beach (renamed Gordita Beach), California in 1970. Proving, as fans always suspected, that he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow (published in 1973) stoned.
Inherent Vice has been described as “Pynchon Lite” and a “beach read” and it’s true that of all his tomes, this is the easiest to digest without recourse to a complete encyclopedia and a ten kilo dictionary.
But on page 347, Pynchon nails perhaps the main reason why the world we’re living in is too broke to fix. Doc, in conversation with Crocker Fenway, a man who speaks for Those Who Have Always Ruled, is told:
“We’re in place. We’ve been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor — all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause…eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave--a chili dog, for Christ’s sake. We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible.”
Wasn’t it Pynchon who jumped out of a second story window to avoid being photographed? It may be an anecdote, but I admire that level of determination. I think I’d be like that if I was famous.
Well that’s how the legend goes. He also got a standup comic to accept the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow. Loved the bag over the head in The Simpson’s episodes. And the voice on this trailer sounds suspiciously like Jeff Bridges. Seems old Tom’s had a good time being his unseen self all these years. Scary thing, though, he’ll be 74 in a few months.