The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles and vice versa

[Bern]

Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic '60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. (The Big Lebowski meets The Big Sleep.) And if you map the novel against Pynchon's life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.
- Wired magazine