Inherent Vice.

PYNCHON, Thomas.

Item Number: 141204

New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

First edition of Pynchon’s darkly comic detective novel set in 1970s California. Octavo, original half cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Tal Goretsky and Darren Haggar.

A postmodern novel that warps the stylistic conventions of detective fiction, Pynchon's Inherent Vice follows sleuth Larry "Doc" Sportello who suddenly becomes involved in a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom is ex girlfriend just happens to be in love with. A review by academic Louis Menand in The New Yorker declared the novel "a generally lighthearted affair", while adding that there were still "a few familiar apocalyptic touches, and a suggestion that countercultural California is a lost continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of co-optation and repression." In 2014, the novel was adapted into an American period neo-noir mystery comedy film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Eric Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Jena Malone, Hong Chau, Joanna Newsom, Jeannie Berlin, Maya Rudolph, Michael K. Williams and Martin Short.