dylanberman's reviews
37 reviews

This book got me into Pynchon. From what I hear and from reading Inherent Vice, some of his other works are more refined. That being said this book is so strange, enthralling, and hilarious. The way Pynchon draws out this to be or not to be conspiracy makes the world feel full of secretive power and meaning in places most would never look. 

Carters prose conjures crystal clear imagery in the absurd, terrible, fairytale world of this post modern gullivers travels. An impactful and tragic story of a man stumbling into and ultimately being burned by a variety of different groups and their meta narratives about life. A sadistic, demonic count, a traveling circus, a boat dwelling native tribe, zealous centaurs, a BDSM whorehouse, and an African despot, the story follows desiderio as he joins, understands, appreciates, and ultimately rejects and is hurt by  the contradictory ‘absolute truths’ presented to him by the groups he falls in and out with. A beautifully disturbing story about the search for meeting the dangers of adherence to grand narratives.

This book is interesting and I recommend it as art. It expresses so much pain and rage. That being said, it abandons any form of structure or literary convention so heavily that it was genuinely too difficult to tell what was happening and too stripped back and abstract to be emotional invested in the story, to the extent that one exists. 

There are moments where Piercy’s writing is powerful. A few scenes of this book I was genuinely moved by. But most of it is dull. I find her imagined future uninteresting, her critique of society pretty one dimensional, and while Connie is tragic, I never felt deeply invested in what was happening. 

Eugenides writes with such compelling, darkly humorous, eerily beautiful, and unique attention to detail it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t live this story. A clever, hilarious, tragic, and condemning portrait 70s suburban America and society at large reacts to mental illness and suicide. The unique narrative framing makes the book an extremely powerful commentary on the obsessive and dehumanizing way young (and old) men view women. 
Eugenides’ prose finds abstract beauty in the unnoticed details of the mundane. It’s haunting, romantic and incisive. 

Major spoilers


Inherent Vice is an unfolding psychedelic web of hilarious and compelling characters and mysteries, all somehow connected to the powerful and illusory Golden Fang. There’s an ex junkie surf rock musician who’s faked his own death after being recruited for COINTEL pro to work with fascist vigilantes, a Jewish millionaire LA real estate mogel (surrounded by neo nazi biker gang bodyguards) who did too many psychedelics and decided he had to give up his money and create a free housing techno-commune outside of Las Vegas only to be taken away in a plot involving his wife, her boyfriend, and perhaps the FBI, there’s a Vietnam vet turned try hard hippie out of guilt who’s into environmentalism and film, his girlfriend who’s part of a cult that does acid to commune with the Sea God of Lemuria, a good boy fascist aspiring TV star cop who hides his grief and quest for revenge under hilarious machismo with a personal vendetta against the protagonist , a Reagan loving police approved assassin, and so much more. All of these characters are stumbled into by the lovable fuckup protagonist Doc Sportello, a washed up hippie stoner and private eye, just trying to figure out where his ex girlfriend went. This book is ridiculous, hilarious, and a perfectly executed analysis of the collapse of the free love 60s and all of the push for positive social change into a much more cynical and conservative 70s. 

‘…yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim it’s better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.’ 

‘Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.’

‘What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.’