Sounds Good

Thomas Pynchon's new book is a surf noir taking place in LA during the 1970s.

Massive plot confusion is, of course, a noir tradition, from Chandler's knotty intrigues to Faulkner's notoriously incoherent script for The Big Sleep to the dazed indifference of Altman's The Long Goodbye. Pynchon—and this will surprise no one—is far more interested in the fog banks and blind alleys and conspiratorial demons that haunt Los Angeles than he is in solving who did what to whom. As in Vineland, the true threat is not from any individual psychotic lawman or acid-crazed biker but from something more mysterious and evil—"the ancient forces of greed and fear," those psychic agents at work in the dark at the dawn of the '70s "reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday." The inherent vice that lurks at the heart of every "concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in," according to Pynchon, is that same undoing exploited by Vineland's sadistic federal agent and proto-Reaganite Brock Vond, whose "genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it."

I'll probably start it and never finish it.

Hat tip, Phil.