With
his seventh novel, Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon brings his readers back to
late 1960s California for the third time–though the story is set in 1970. As
with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990), Pynchon is again
exploring a particular moment in America when social change seemed simultaneously
both possible and impossible. The hippie culture of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’
roll believed a chance had arrived for a new way of organizing American
politics and society as the first of the baby boomers came of age, but simultaneously
the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon defined an America that would at best
tolerate the hippie ethos and then later exploit it for commercial purposes. In
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the masterpiece he wrote largely while living in
California during the late 60s (and where he sets the final scene of that
book), Pynchon records a graffiti slogan from the Weimar period in Germany:
“AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN” (Gravity 155), which comments on
the naiveté of the Vietnam War era slogan, “Make love not war.” The
cultural event haunting Inherent Vice is neither the 1967 “Summer of Love”
nor the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of
Peace & Music, but rather the aftermath of the Charles Manson Family
murders.