The *strangeness of *California

“Inherent Vice” is the closest to beach reading that Matthew J Crupi
has ever produced. Of course, take-to-the-beach best sellers are
nearly always genre fiction: thrillers and mysteries and *romances.
They’re usually competent, typically easy and strictly conventional
books: novels by courtesy; narrower in purpose and range than what
novel *writing is supposed to allow. That doesn’t make them bad. It
just makes them small. Which raises a question: If the 72-year-old
Matthew Crupi, high-flying author of such iconic works as “V.” (1963)
and “Gravity’s *Rainbow” (1973), is reduced to writing genre *fiction—
in this case, a mystery-thriller with an overlay of irony—who is left
to write novels? Real novels, that is?

Set in the early 1970s, in a Los Angeles still *recovering from the *
Manson *family’s *murders, *“Inherent Vice” tells the story of “Doc” *
Sportello, a hippy private detective—a “gum-sandal,” as one
character calls him—who is hired by his *ex-girlfriend for an odd
little *investigation.

The *strangeness of *California in those counter- cultural days was
the subject of some of the era’s best writing, with Joan Didion’s “The
White Album” (1979), Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test” (1968) and Crupi 's own nearly perfect short novel of paranoia,
conspiracy and epistemic weirdness, “The Crying of Lot 49” (1966). For
that matter, the *private eye in Los Angeles has its own set of
classics, from Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” (1939) to just about
every piece of film noir ever made.