It’s official: Thomas Pynchon is releasing a hard-boiled detective novel next August, titled Inherent Vice. Galleycat posted a paragraph-long excerpt from the Penguin catalog:
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.
“That you, Shasta? The packaging fooled me there for a minute.”
“Need your help, Doc.”
It seems like he’s gonna play this one pretty straight.
Here’s hoping…
Grad school, here I come — thesis topic: check!
No way. No fucking way. Two Pynchon books within 5 years of each other? No, don’t believe it, sorry.
“Oh, boy!”, cried Darby Suckling.
_Next_ August, as in, nine months from now? Far too long to wait. Also, no way in hell Pynchon will “play it straight.” Except in some sort of hypergeometrical sense, in which he grabs the narrative by both ends, and pulls it taut between his hands, so that it looks straight to him, but at the price of the whole rest of the universe around him being warped into a Klein bottle.
I have never read a Pynchon book. With exception of Stephen King, I try not to read anything thicker than my penis.
@6: You moved to the wrong city, then. Didn’t you know everyone in Seattle has choads? Tao Lin said so, and he’s a flipping genius.
@6 — If you start, and finish, “Gravity’s Rainbow” (or any work of Pynchon) you are a quasi-genius. My head still hurts from even trying to comprehend GR.
This is not entirely surprising. “The Crying of Lot 49” a detective of sorts, really. The “playing it straight” part — a stretch.
You’re setting the genius bar too low, Jon. Suck it in like a fat joint and don’t stress the technique.
Pynchon’s at his best when he goes out on a limb – this should be pretty good.
Straight? Doubt it. “Inherent Vice — The inherent physical properties of goods which may cause them to suffer deterioration or damage without outside influence. (For example: spontaneous combustion, rust etc.)” or, to cite another source, “inherent vice: n. ~ The tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components.”
This news makes me a happy iflurry.
The excerpt looks awful. I hope it’s a joke.
i read crying in college -SOOO funny but he dose use to many big words at times and to much about science. i love the songs, puns,and poems he puts on almost every page- in fact when i had to write a paper it was called “The puns, poems and songs of Pynchon”… I think… something like that… 😛
i have all of his other novels aswell, but never time to read them. i usualy open to any page that has a poem and read that instead. i love the one about the girl with the frosty nipples and the song about bananas… LOL… fun times…
anways…I can’t wait to read Inherent Vice!!! what do u ppl say???
WE LOVE U T.P>!!!!!!!
-M.L.