In the New York Times, Walter Kirn complained that the narrative progressed “from digression to digression…periodically pausing for dope-head gabfests of preposterous intensity.” Sam Anderson’s take in New York opened: “I hate Thomas Pynchon.” Even sympathetic critics didn’t regard Inherent Vice as altogether serious. The critical reception was less than positive. Published in 2009, just three years after the sprawling Against the Day, this detective story set in the spring of 1970 and featuring a hippie private eye named Larry “Doc” Sportello surprised everyone. That’s why Inherent Vice was such a surprise. Following the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, it was 11 years before he put out another book. So I went to Vancouver to find out what makes Inherent Vice so divisive. “Although the critics panned Inherent Vice,” he said, “a lot of scholars were quick to recognize it’s an important book.” The book is generally considered by book critics to be “Pynchon lite,” but my view is that it’s the best of Pynchon’s California novels.Īccording to Carswell, this is a view his colleagues share. “It’s not going to get any closer,” he said.Ĭarswell and I both write for the Los Angeles–based punk-rock zine Razorcake, and on numerous occasions, we’ve discussed Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice. I live in Southern California, and he urged me to attend the conference. Sean Carswell, a Pynchon scholar and professor at Cal State Channel Islands, has spent his academic career researching the reclusive novelist and wrote the book Occupy Pynchon: Politics After Gravity’s Rainbow. The pandemic, however, played havoc with the schedule, which is why the 2022 conference ended up in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia. Since 1994, International Pynchon Week (IPW) has been held more or less every two years at an academic institution in Europe.
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