[!@#$%!]

(because i got obsessed now)

The private eye form provides Pynchon with a vehicle for investigating the question of who lost, or stole, or killed, or brainwashed, or denatured the Sixties—never mind that no satisfying answer could conceivably be forthcoming. Pynchon seems to have ingested an entire archive of genre variations, ranging from the classic forms of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald to every subspecies of pastiche and burlesque: Roger L. Simon’s pot-smoking detective Moses Wine, Gregory MacDonald’s Fletch, the Coen Brothers’ Dude in The Big Lebowski, a hundred TV spinoffs. It’s not a question of homage but of throwing absolutely everything into the mix for processing, every stray particle of a commonly shared culture—every joke good or bad that you ever heard, every commercial you couldn’t escape from, every sex fantasy or tabloid crime story that inhabited your dreams, every tag line dredged up from ancient comic strips or pulp stories. This is a book that derives a good part of its narrative arc from an investigation into the cryptic message: “Beware the Golden Fang.”



https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/0...inherent-vice/