People who have seen Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice seem to fall along two strident lines: on one side, there are the people who think the movie actively doesn't care about its viewers, and on the other, there are the people who think the movie is a dense and slyly comedic wonderland that demands multiple viewings. Which side will you be on? Hell, I don't know. You'll have to decide for yourself.

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Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether Inherent Vice floats or sinks on Rotten Tomatoes. For me, the best part of Inherent Vice the movie's high-profile release is that Inherent Vice the novel is currently climbing the bestseller lists of local bookstores. If you got a gift certificate to a bookstore this year, you might want to consider cashing it in for a copy of Vice in paperback. Even if you've never read Pynchon, or even if Pynchon's later work like Mason & Dixon and Against the Day scared you off, you'll be pleased to discover that Inherent Vice is Pynchon's most accessible work in years.

I reviewed the book back when it was released in 2009, and the pleasures of the book seem pretty similar to the positive reviews of the film. Inherent Vice is Pynchon at his pulpiest and most cartoonish. The book is simultaneously a slick ride through pop culture and a dirge for the love generation at exactly the moment that it gave up on its principles. From my review:

Pynchon has clearly read a lot of mystery novels of questionable provenance—everything about Vice, from its ugly, neon-lettered cover to its down-on-his-luck private investigator Doc Sportello, positively reeks with the pungent odor of the dime-store gumshoe thriller. It begins, as all good mysteries do, with a woman from Doc's past ("Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look") wandering back into his life with a problem in tow. Vice is set in the late '60s and Doc is an unrepentant, dope-smoking dropout, the backwash of the Woodstock generation. He smokes his joints down to nothingness—you could condense Vice into a 50-page treatise on the handling of roaches—and his memory is a clouded, cottony haze.

The adaptation of Inherent Vice will hit Seattle screens in the first couple weeks of the new year, which means you've got a couple weeks to slurp down the novel before the movie comes out. It's a fun reading experience with some fascinating contemporary cultural commentary layered beneath the detective tropes; I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.