> Skip to content
  • Published: 2 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448103904
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

Inherent Vice




The legendary author of V and Gravity's Rainbow is back with a taut, psychedelic yarn, about the sixties, featuring private eye Doc Sportello...

Read the cult classic behind the major new film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon and Josh Brolin.

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that 'love' is another of those words going around at the moment, like 'trip' or 'groovy', except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there...or...if you were there, then you...or, wait, is it...

  • Published: 2 March 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448103904
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

About the author

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Also by Thomas Pynchon

See all

Praise for Inherent Vice

The intellectual game-play is characteristically dazzling...colourful and pleasurable

Financial Times

Pynchon leaves the rest of the American literary establishment at the starting gate...the range over which he moves is extraordinary, not simply in terms of ideas explored but also in the range of emotions he takes you through

Time Out

The most important and mysterious writer of his generation

Time

You don't have to have been there; if you're willing, he'll take you there

Michael Carlson, Spectator

The pioneering work in a genre you'd have to call psychedelic Noir ...Who writes sentences as beautiful as Pynchon?

Sam Leith, Daily Mail

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

Guardian

Brilliant and brain boggling by turns

Daily Mail

Inherent Vice works brilliantly as both a neon-lit noir and as a psychedelic lament to the Sixties

Sunday Telegraph

Hilarious and thought-provoking

London Review of Books

A warm and joyous read. There is softness about this book, but also a tinge of melancholy

Billy O’Callaghan, Irish Examiner