Like book geeks the world over, I have a small number of titles that mean a lot to me and bear regular, repeat reading. This year I have, for the umpteenth time, revisited Nathanael West’s wonderful book of desperation and boredom set in a 1930s Hollywood demi-monde, The Day Of The Locust, as it seemed to perfectly chime with our times. I also re-read The Sun Also Rises, to see if Ernest Hemingway’s bruised romanticism chimes with me as it did when I first read it 25(!) years ago. (NB – it does.)

There are of course many others, but none do I revisit more often than Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49. In all my puff I cannot remember ever having enjoyed a book as much as I did when I first read this one. Each time I re-read it, not only do I enjoy it just as much as I did first time round, but I find myself thinking about it for days afterwards. It’s not only that I find new things in it, although I do, but that my view of what it is about changes completely from reading to reading. Not subtle nuances, but complete 180 shifts.

The fact that Pynchon himself is a recluse who makes JD Salinger look like a chat-show whore only adds to the mystique. If you haven’t read The Crying Of Lot 49, it is a dazzling hoot of a book about paranoia, 60s counter-culture, 16th C European mail systems and The Man and at only 150 pages I heartily recommend it.

However Pynchon’s other books are not so easily consumed. Gravity’s Rainbow is stunning but extremely dense, not to say very, very, very long. Neal Stephenson fans will see Gravity’s Rainbow as the real deal, but casual readers may find it too much like hard work. The others are if anything harder still, but with less reward for perseverance. Now however, Pynchon’s normal working time frame of a book every fifteen years has given way to a flurry of activity and Inherent Vice is his third in the last ten years. There’s still no photographs or interviews, but at least there is the sign of an author who once again wishes to entertain and communicate as much as to confound.

This can only be a good thing and Inherent Vice is both shorter and easier to read than any of his recent novels. Pynchon has taken on the Chandler-esque detective novel and replanted it into his own counter culture LA of the late 1960s. The restrictions of genre fiction tone down his more willful excesses and the results are great. While not being quite a beach read, Pynchon has written something readily and non-threateningly enjoyable.  Inherent Vice is certainly his best book since Vineland and I would say, the most fun since The Crying Of Lot 49.

If anything Inherent Vice reminds me of nothing more than Robert Altman’s take on Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, also set in LA during the comedown at the end of the 60s. It starred Elliott Gould as a dog-eared Philip Marlowe treading a path between big business, the counter culture, sinister crime bosses and the entertainment industry. Inherent Vice does much the same within the framework of a recognisable plot and feasible characters.

It still has Pynchon-esque larks aplenty, but also has something to say about the 60s and the 00s. If Inherent Vice is full of mayhem, then it is mature reflective, brooding mayhem. A very, very good book indeed and one I look forward to revisiting at various points in the future.

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