When old Tom Pynchon publishes, it’s a big day. People know about it, well certain people do. They obsess, specualte and as they count their coins out over the counter, wonder why so many have already disappeared off the pile when Daunts has only been open forty minutes.
Last time, for Against the Day, there was a press release supposedly written by the mystery man himself. For Inherent Vice, his Ballardian looking latest, the Pynchon Project has been lower key. Phone calls and e-mails to Penguin Press were unreturned. Was it really going to come out? The whole thing felt like Wonka’s, nobody in – nobody out: somehow the books still got themselves on the shelves. That’s what happens in the post digital world.
Inherent Vice is set up as a Sixties thriller, with the usual cast list of supra real characters and a trippy LA plot. The Pynchonites want it to be scrawled with question marks and his trademark sense of knowing. Glenn from Blackwell’s rates it anyway. ‘Not his best but his easiest read yet’.
There’s still some firepower left in the old missile launcher then…?
