Inherent Vice
Doc Sportello is bewildered when an ex-girlfriend returns to recruit him in a plot to kidnap a wealthy construction executive. Soon, Sportello finds himself in the midst of a thrilling conspiracy with an undercover cop and a group of dentists who are swindling the IRS.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
30mentions
23people
2013–2025years
60% recommend33% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- With Gravity's Rainbow you can either read it and make peace with the fact that every acronym, reference, character, plot point etc. won't be fully understood or remembered (that's kind of the point with this type of writing style, imo), or you can read it with a companion guide kinda like how some people play video games.
I also liked Crying of Lot 49. Inherent Vice is also a bit of an easier time.
- There are basically two sorts of Pynchon novels[1]:
Gravity’s Rainbow, V and Against the Day are these monumental books which are sometimes really harrowing and hard to read (amazing in my opinion, but tough to read none the less).
Lot 49, Inherent Vice, Vineland and the new one are kind of “weird noir” gumshoe novels - funny and full of whacky conspiracies etc.
Bleeding edge is more like the second lot. I would definitely recommend people to read The Crying of Lot 49 and/or Inherent Vice to make up their minds whether they like Pynchon. Then you’ll know whether you want to invest in reading V or Gravity’s Rainbow etc.
[1] I’m gonna leave Mason & Dixon to one side because it’s sort of its own thing.
- Second Inherent Vice as a book, also a brilliant film.
- Inherent Vice is such a fun whacky read too. I kinda wanted to read Gravity’s Rainbow but my friend (who also recommended Inherent Vice) said I probably wouldn’t have the patience for it lol. He’s usually right
- Inherent Vice was great too. Gravity's Rainbow took me a few times to get into but it was a wild ride.
His early book "The Crying of Lot 49" was also really good.
- By deliberative, do you mean something more sophisticated than “deterministic” ( to mean, e.g., that regarding a process that integrates internal & external inputs in a way that cannot be Kolmogorov-decompressed :)?
More concretely, can a coach note the differences — why world champions need coaches, not necessarily coaches who were themselves world champions.
>[haha]
mjburgess thread commenter came back with anxiety-depression axis, which seems personally more salient, as I seem to wander into latent conflicts with depressives who seem depressed at the same level that i am anxious (in a particular situation).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674
Tangent to the tangent to the tangent [maybe this is the right moment to call it “peripheral”, if not “bounding”]:
Meditating on this rare moment of anger (because of the vitious still in myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388
That said, any pointers from Altemeyer I should watch out for before I go into a deepdive mapping the NB axis to the DA axis?
(Tangential edit:
inherent vice is imho the most autobiographical (as Sortilège?) of Pynchon, you might enjoy the soundtrack from the adaptation as well, esp. the rewilding of Can
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe)
https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_in...
)
