The
Fairfax Library Book Discussion Group will meet Thursday, October 13th at 7
p.m. in the meeting room of the Fairfax Library to discuss our October book Inherent
Vice by Thomas Pynchon.
Discussion
questions prepared by NoveList are below.
Here
are some links for additional background and information:
Thomas
Pynchon fiercely protects his privacy but here is a brief
bio and some random
facts compiled by students at Pomona University
Wiki
page for Inherent Vice with page by page notes, articles and more
Rolling
Stone article: “Pynchon
for Beginners”
Coming
up, we have the following books to look forward to reading and discussing:
Thurs.
Nov. 10th Season
of the Witch by David Talbot
Thurs.
Dec. 8th Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
Thanks
for reading with us. I look forward to seeing you at the Fairfax Library.
Beth Bailey-Gates
NoveList Discussion Questions
Inherent Vice by
Thomas Pynchon
What is Doc's relationship with drugs and how does it shape his character?
In the noir tradition of "private eyes," Doc fuels his work with substance abuse; his intoxicant of choice is marijuana, rather than liquor, which he consumes with the casual assurance of an everyday user. His perceptions and theories are often framed by the amount he's had, either assuring us that "he hadn't been smoking much" when he sees a mysterious, lovely orange light play across Shasta's face (p. 5); or, indirectly conceding he's become too stoned to function: "[T]he phone rang again, and he had one of those brief lapses where you forget how to pick up the receiver" (p. 35). His aptitude seems sharpest when he hasn't been overindulging, but this fact rarely seems to factor in his consumption.
For Doc, smoking pot is an emblematic lifestyle choice, not just a chemical crutch. It separates him from "gentlemen of the straight world persuasion" (p.4), like his counterpart in the police force, Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen. Doc's neighborhood reflects his chosen identity, too: on Gordita Beach, "weeknights . . . weren't too different from weekends" (p.4).
Pot smoking suspends Doc in a state of permanent immaturity. It is strongly hinted that this is why Shasta split, and she surveys with distaste "everything that hadn't changed" in his habits, represented by his décor: " [an] authentic English Pub Dartboard up on the wagon wheel and the whorehouse swag lamp with the purple psychedelic bulb. . . the collection of model hot rods made entirely of Coors cans…the velvet painting and so forth" (p. 4). His immaturity even bleeds into stupidity, for example when he defensively compares himself to Sherlock Holmes (who used cocaine in the original stories), without realizing he's a fictional character: "No, he's real. He lives at this real address in London. Well, maybe not anymore, it was years ago, he has to be dead by now" (p.96).
Doc's drug use makes him an occasionally likeable but often unreliable narrator, who forms paranoid connections between the novel's numerous loosely tangled plots. Many prove to be dead ends, or red herrings, as with the initial case Shasta dispatches him on. There is a tissue that stitches them all together, but as with most noir novels the actual plot matters less than the atmosphere it evokes. Doc's drug amplifies amplify the sense of wacky paranoia that pervades the novel. When stoned, he goes down strange rabbit holes of cause and effect -- not unlike those that a reader may concoct while trying to unravel a complex noir plot.
What does Coy Harlington's character reveal about Doc?
Doc considers himself a rogue outside the "the straight world," living apart and even above the corrupt morass of betrayal and greed that he sees in the corporate and law enforcement communities. Even when the plots begin to get seriously scary, and bodies start piling up, Doc is unwilling to involve the police. "I wish….just once I could trust them," he sighs. "But it's like the force of gravity, they never pull in any but the one direction" (p. 194).
Coy Harlington is also part of the subculture, an inveterate drug user and a surf rocker, who becomes an overt tool of the forces Doc despises. Coy "works mostly for the Red Squad and the…Public Disorder Intelligence Division," (p.122) infiltrating subversive, would-be revolutionary groups and delivering their members into the hands of a shadowy right-wing vigilante organization with ties to powerful people and elements within the LAPD. The job gave his aimless life direction, and financial security, motivations not dissimilar from Doc's reasons for becoming a private eye. But Coy soured on the mission (which required him to fake his own death and separate from his family), in large part because many of the people he seems to be setting up "were looking at deep possibilities including real death" (p.302).
Coy's position can be seen as a more dramatic version of Doc's own: "Far as I see, you and Coy, you're peas in a pod," says Shasta. "Both of you, cops who never wanted to be cops. Rather be surfing or smoking or fucking or anything but what you're doing. You guys must've thought you'd be chasing criminals, and instead you're both working for them" (p. 312-314). This is an exaggerated claim on her part -- it is not clear that Doc is really working for anyone at this point in the novel -- but it is clear that she has struck a nerve. He fears becoming like Coy, a tool for oppressive forces that are beyond his ken and will gleefully manipulate his rebellious nature for their own ends.
Because Doc sees himself in Coy, the latter's redemption and freedom become a primary motivation in the final chapters of the novel. After it is revealed that Shasta is fine, and the Golden Fang conspiracy far too large for Doc to successfully tangle with, it is Coy's fate that the private eye devotes himself to. When Doc has defeated the small time bad guys and has the leverage to negotiate with their bosses, he does not ask anything for himself or Shasta. Instead he asks that Coy be released from his bondage to the right wing vigilantes (who in turn are being run by the Golden Fang, who are really a cabal of exceedingly wealthy businessmen).
What is the novel's central conflict?
Because several of Doc's cases aren't remotely about what he thinks they are, the novel raises interesting choices about what its central conflict -- or point -- may be. At first, tension between hippies and law enforcement -- epitomized by Doc's wary rivalry with the cop, "Bigfoot" Bjornsen -- seems very important. Early in the novel, Doc slurs Bjornsen as "the old hippie-hating mad dog himself…after a busy day of civil-rights violations" (p.9).
But these personal tensions are lessened as the story unfolds and the violent, large-scale nature of the Golden Fang operation is revealed. Behind almost every character looms the immensity of the Golden Fang: an elite conspiracy of epic proportions, driven by a one-sided class war that the 1960's hopeful dream of change (epitomized by 1960s hippies like Doc) has not dislodged. Crocker Fenway explains to Doc that the Golden Fang is, was, and will be, LA's ultimate power: "It's about being in place, we're in place. We've been in place forever. Look around, real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor -- all of that's ours. It's always been ours….We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible" (p.346). By "you people," Crocker doesn't just mean hippies like Doc -- but everyone who isn't part of the wealthy, powerful elite. Coy expresses a similar realization after figuring out that his right-wing vigilante masters are also just tools of those with still more power, who "feel entitled to fuck with the lives of all who weren't as good or bright as they were, which meant everybody" (p.301).
The terrifying reality of entrenched elitism -- and the violence it lives on -- is Doc's real nemesis, and he cannot grapple with it. Doc is set up to kill the Golden Fang henchmen, Puck and Adrian, to avenge the murder of Bjornsen's partner by the Golden Fang years earlier; otherwise, Doc would never have dreamed of taking on such a huge organization. Once Bjornsen gives him the Golden Fang heroin as a "reward," Doc is all the more cognizant of how dangerous the game has become -- and he wants out. Although Doc realizes he has only made a dent in their organization, he exchange the heroin to secure Coy's release from his obligations to the Golden Fang. As a counterpoint, against the novel's message about the massive nature of corrupt elitism, Coy affirms that the others -- those outside the elite -- also have staying power: "We've been laid siege to by far worse, and we're still here" (p.347).
What does Mickey Wolfmann's story arc tell us about the larger message of Inherent Vice?
The disappearance of Mickey Wolfmann is presented to us in the opening of Inherent Vice as the central mystery for Doc to investigate. He is meant to be a thoroughly disreputable capitalist, "biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi" (p.7). He is a rapacious real estate developer, accompanied by a bodyguard of ex-cons who are members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
But Wolfmann -- the "bad boy capitalist" -- is reformed by his encounters with Shasta, and his induction into counterculture, which convinced him of the evil of his own ways. One of his bodyguards tells Doc that he had begun to consider a big change: "All the money he ever made -- he was working on a way to just give it back…Wouldn't be the first rich guy on a guilt trip lately" (p.150). Wolfmann becomes caught up in the 1960s utopian dream: "I feel as if I've awakened from a dream of a crime for which I can never atone, an act I can never go back and choose not to commit. I can't believe I spent my whole life making people pay for shelter, when it ought to've been free" (p.244).
But even his vast wealth isn't enough to withstand the powerful societal forces that want to maintain the status quo, in this case the Golden Fang and the FBI. As one federal agent derisively explains it to Doc, "Suddenly [Wolfmann] decides to change his life and give away millions to an assortment of degenerates -- Negroes, longhairs, drifters" (p. 244) -- and those in power (the Gold Fang as well as the FBI) simply can’t let such a valuable asset go. The only time Doc sees Wolfmann, he is being escorted by a small army of FBI agents through a Las Vegas hotel. Wolfmann has reverted to his bad old ways, and his utopian affordable housing project has been abandoned; there is "no more acid-head philanthropist," because "They did something to him" (emphasis added, p. 252).
Wolfmann's arc is symbolic of Inherent Vice's central premise. The 1960s ideal of peaceful revolution is inevitably undercut by the frailties and corruptions endemic to any human endeavor. Wolfmann becomes aware of the crimes for which he can never atone, the flaws at the core of his being, but still cannot overcome them. Inherent Viceseems to imply that such obstacles are insurmountable. Hence the name of the novel itself: "Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice," which Doc is told means "what you can't avoid" (p.351).
What forces does Inherent Vice blame for the deterioration of 1960s idealism?
Inherent Vice is set in 1970, in the wake of the Manson murders and deteriorating 1960s counterculture. Paranoia abounds and the idealism and free-wheeling fun that Doc and his cohort hoped would last forever seems to have evaporated. Contemplating Mickey Wolfmann's abandonment of utopian idealism, Doc feels "caught in a low-level bummer" because "the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness" (page 254). Shaken, he considers the possibility that behind every "concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in. . . those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power," and every other thing they could, "for the ancient forces of greed and fear" (p.129-130).
But these authoritarian forces are not the sole source of the doom of the 1960s revolution. The novel also implies that the roots of its decay lay within a type of inward-looking, drug-hazed, self-obsessed brand of 1960s radicalism that is, ultimately, unproductive. Doc's own lifestyle might be considered representative of the issue: when everyone just chases the next high or good time, there is focused effort toward setting and achieving higher goals. The urge to "do your own thing" becomes isolating, rather than building community.
This inherent vice of the 1960s generation is typified by the long row of hippies Doc observes engrossed at an upscale retail music shop, each wearing headphones and seeming alone in a crowd. Unlike the "outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience," Doc sees that here they each listen separately, in "confinement and mutual silence." He is further confused to think that "some of them later at the register would actually be spending money to hear rock 'n' roll" (p.176). Doc thinks they have become complicit in the commoditization of the counterculture, sacrificing the greater cause for their individual experience.
The Golden Fang aren't winning merely because they have the power, but because they are able to use their would-be opponents' weaknesses to subvert the cause. They are better able to take advantage of humanity's inherent vice, original sin, than are those who share Doc's vague ideas of free love, drugs, and freedom.
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