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Reluctantly investigating a kidnapping threat against his ex-girlfriend's billionaire beau, Doc Sportello tackles a bizarre tangle of nefarious characters before stumbling on a mysterious entity that may actually be a tax shelter for a dental group.
"Se llama Sportello, Doc Sportello, y es un detective privado un tanto peculiar en el colorista Los ngeles de finales de los aos sesenta. Haca ya tiempo que Doc no vea a su ex, Shasta, seductora femme fatale, cuando sta recurre a sus servicios porque ha desaparecido su nuevo amante, un magnate inmobiliario que haba visto la luz del buen karma, un tanto distorsionada por el cido, y quera devolver a la sociedad todo lo que haba expoliado. Sportello se ve enredado entonces en una intriga en la que los escrpulos chispean por su ausencia y cuya trama es casi la de una novela negra clsica. A partir de ah, Thomas Pynchon pergea un retrato desbocado de una California poblada por surfistas embriagados de la mitologa de las olas gigantes, combatientes de Vietnam o agentes del FBI reconvertidos en hippies, pandillas carcelarias, la escabrosa sombra de Charlie Manson y sus aclitas, una brutal organizacin secreta de dentistas, polis corruptos, una protointernet o bellas masajistas de sexualidad ambigua. Todo sazonado con dilogos y guios hilarantes, al ritmo de una frentica banda sonora que sirve de rquiem psicodlico por una poca que pudo ser y no fue"--Cover p. 4.… (más)
Bigrider7: A pair of whimsical books where reality is never quite what it appears, and is much more indiscrete and lacking in continuity than many of us can handle. Secrets about how life operates lurking just beyond the views of perceptions
Se llama Sportello, Doc Sportello, y es un detective privado un tanto peculiar en Los Ángeles de finales de los 60. Hacía ya tiempo que Doc no veía a su ex, Shasta, seductora femme fatale, cuando ésta recurre a sus servicios porque ha desaparecido su nuevo amante, un magnate inmobiliario. Sportello se ve enredado entonces en una intriga en la que los escrúpulos chispean por su ausencia y cuya trama es casi la de una novela negra clásica.
Se llama Sportello, Doc Sportello, y es un detective privado un tanto peculiar en el colorista Los Ángeles de finales de los años sesenta. Hacía ya tiempo que Doc no veía a su ex, Shasta, seductora femme fatale, cuando ésta recurre a sus servicios porque ha desaparecido su nuevo amante, un magnate inmobiliario que había visto la luz del buen karma, un tanto distorsionada por el ácido, y quería devolver a la sociedad todo lo que había expoliado. Sportello se ve enredado entonces en una intriga en la que los escrúpulos chispean por su ausencia y cuya trama es casi la de una novela negra clásica.
Both shorter and easier to read than any of Pynchon’s previous novels apart from The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice gives the impression of having been easier to write, too. It’s less than three years since Against the Day was published, compared to the 17 that passed between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. That may be one reason why, characteristically hilarious and thought-provoking though it is, Inherent Vice lacks much of the menace and the passion of its predecessors.
Inherent Vice once again delivers the trademark rollicking with-it-ness of an author who doesn’t create fantasy worlds so much as show us our own world at its most fantastic. This time, however, it’s mostly for fun, a high-five for those who were there then, a glimpse into the groove of it all for those who otherwise can only daydream while sampling what Burbank hath bequeathed, whether Adam-12 re-runs, or those Warners/Reprise samplers on used vinyl.
Inherent Vice is by far the least puzzling Pynchon book to enter our airspace: a goof on the Los Angeles noir, starring a chronically stoned PI with a psychedelic wardrobe and a hankering for pizza. At fewer than four hundred pages, it’s also the shortest Pynchon novel to appear since Vineland (1990); you could almost recommend it to your book club, or to your kids, if they still read books.
Ultimately – perhaps regrettably – Inherent Vice is a wash. Depending on your angle, it’s either a breezy Something that looks like an airy Nothing, or vice versa.
In his zany new novel, Inherent Vice, Pynchon goes to the Golden State again, tunneling back to the early 1970s, to paint a nostalgic portrait of a fictional beach town north of LA. Here, the counterculture has lost out to the forces of control, governmental power and, well, sobriety.
añadido por Shortride | editarThe Dallas Morning News, John Freeman(Aug 23, 2009)
Like the stoned symposium on tuna, Doc’s manhunt for the AWOL billionaire eventually spirals off into absurdity, becoming a collage of trippy interludes peopled by all manner of goofs and lowlifes. These scenes only fitfully advance the narrative and sometimes cause us to forget there is one. But that’s as expected, since Pynchon doesn’t write plots; instead, he devises suggestive webs of circumstance whose meanings depend on the angles from which they’re viewed and can seem ominous and banal by turns, like so many situations in life. In Pynchon, the problem of distinguishing between coincidences and conspiracies, between the prosaic and the profound, is one of the defining tasks of consciousness. For some, like Doc, whose cerebral equipment is particularly unreliable, this perennial mental challenge can prove insuperable, but that may be why Pynchon chose him for the job. His confusion is all of ours exaggerated, his paranoia a version of normal patternmaking amped way up by his intake of hallucinogens.
Pynchon is clearly playing around, but this isn’t an easy read; the cast numbers in the thousands, and trying to keep track of the various wheels within wheels can induce motion sickness. Thankfully, the novel is a blast to read regardless of whether it makes sense. It’s as funny as Against The Day was obscure, and the biggest surprise is the way the friendly surface holds true.
Pynchon doesn't do closure. What he does, and brilliantly, is open windows onto a universe where we're all in custody, but we're none of us sure who put on the cuffs.
Pynchon does his best to make it all fun, but Doc still can’t shake his funk as his era fades. He remains positive, though, that somehow “a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time,” which is certainly what Pynchon, as an original hipster himself, tries to do, by redeeming the excesses of the past through a reappraisal of Doc’s era.
Inherent Vice is significantly shorter and less demanding than other recent Pynchon novels, if ultimately less compelling as well. Having weighed things out, unless I'd get some extra letters behind my last name for the effort, I think I'd watch Fletch twice before reading it a second time.
"Inherent Vice" offers a simplified version of Pynchon's enduring political theme, the way that the search for freedom and solidarity, be by the Wobblies or bebop musicians or 60's longhairs, is forever being done in by those who would appropriate the whole world under the banner of greed and fear. Like a good noir detective, Pynchon roots for the underdog. But he knows that the world's inherent vice is that it belongs to the powerful.
Well, there are the drugs, the paranoia, the sex, the attitude and the humor. Other than that, Thomas Pynchon -- with his latest novel, Inherent Vice -- is having a great time expertly channeling the hard-boiled detective riffs of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
añadido por Shortride | editarChicago Sun-Times, John Barron(Aug 9, 2009)
Here's how much fun this novel is: En route to a family reunion recently, I spent three stormy hours on the runway of the Philadelphia airport in a dinky commuter jet, stuck next to a guy I came to think of as Mr. Angry Man. But I was reading Inherent Vice, and I was having such a blast following Doc Sportello around Gordita Beach circa 1969 that I never even felt annoyed.
The author wraps his serio-comic story in a relatively conventional fashion, but it's a testament to his narrative control that he could steer the tale toward a satisfying finale. In the end, "Inherent Vice" emerges as a deeply cynical yet amusing snapshot of the Woodstock generation's final days in the sun.
What's most impressive about Pynchon is his versatility. Having proven his ability to achieve boredom on a colossal scale with his previous novel, 2006's indigestible bolus of literary roughage "Against the Day," Pynchon now proves equally dull as a relative pamphleteer who limits himself to a mere 369 pages, then simply stops instead of concludes.
"Inherent Vice" is the work of an anti-Elmore Leonard. Leonard says the key to his strategy is leaving out the boring bits. Pynchon dares to leave out the interesting stuff.
Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer. With his most accessible book to date – half Chinatown, half Fear and Loathing, all searing jeremiad about the modern American soul – he may have come up with something even the British literati can read.
I don't know that Thomas Pynchon has responded to a dare - unless he dared himself, as often the best writers do - to write a deliciously composed dark comedy - a pastiche of the noir detective novel - about Southern California in the late '60s and early '70s and bring it in under 400 pages. But he's done just that. And I'm guessing that most Pynchon fans will be delighted by it. And it may well bring him new young readers for whom this recently departed (psychedelic) era may be as remote as ancient Greece or Rome.
Pynchon is such an intelligent and stylish writer, he can find pay dirt in any vein. Once he gets his mojo going here, the story coalesces into an enjoyably lunatic tapestry... With his inimitable voice and unrivaled imagination, Pynchon is always a pleasure to read, even at his most confounding. Inherent Vice still seems like an exploded subplot, a rambling riff from one of his longer, richer novels. Groovy but indulgent.
añadido por Shortride | editarThe Philadelphia Inquirer, David Hiltbrand(Aug 9, 2009)
There might be serious themes bubbling under the surface, enough to make it more than a pure diversion, but it is what Graham Greene might have called an "entertainment"... In fact, this is all a bit silly, really – but, handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, is as much fun to read as anything you will come across this summer. And how long has it been since Pynchon was fun?
At this point, to attempt to trace the various and tangled lines of intrigue and corruption the novel draws across L.A. and Las Vegas, would take too much space and give away entirely too much. The fun is in the unraveling of the plot and the energy and color with which Pynchon paints his many eccentric, sexy, insane, hapless, and evil characters.
One of the many fascinations of this absorbing and frequently funny crime novel is the way in which its relatively flimsy structure holds Pynchon’s familiar obsessions and techniques.
So, take it to beach, if you like, and spend an afternoon reading it. “Inherent Vice” will do as well, I suppose, as any of a half-dozen other volumes on the summer fiction best-seller list. But isn’t that a sad, diminished way to describe a Thomas Pynchon novel?
From Thomas Pynchon, an author we expect to take decadelong breaks, now emerges his second novel in three years. The pace does him good: Inherent Vice, besides being the literary giant’s most accessible work, is the kind of confident, relaxed effort that might signal a golden age ahead.
Raymond Chandler meets Panama Red in Thomas Pynchon's casual, occasionally hilarious "Inherent Vice" - which makes sense for an author whose works can be measured in kilos (especially the last two, "Mason & Dixon" and "Against the Day"). It also makes sense for an author whose work has long married the perversely dystopic to the poetically giddy, with the same cosmic unease with which louche noir detectives have long found a home under the insistent Los Angeles sun.
Imagine the cult film "The Big Lebowski" as a novel, with touches of "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential" thrown in for good measure. Imagine your favorite Raymond Chandler or James Crumley mystery retold as a hippie whodunit, set in Gordita Beach, Calif., at the very end of the 1960s. Imagine a great American novelist, one who is now a septuagenarian, writing with all the vivacity and bounce of a young man who has just discovered girls. Most of all, imagine sentences and scenes that are so much fun to read that you wish "Inherent Vice" were twice as long as it is. Imagine saying that about a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Inherent Vice laments the erosion of the social, political and ethical possibilities inherent in the protests and upheavals of the 1960s. It shows Pynchon can deliver a rousing, hilarious and streamlined neo-noir tale that touches on his perennial themes without getting entangled in them.
I quarreled with Inherent Vice, the latest novel from the reclusive Thomas Pynchon. I liked its wit, style, and grasp of locale, but deplored its cavalier way with plot. The book confounds, entertains, and stumbles in almost equal measure.
Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.”... to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system.
One could still theoretically argue that any Pynchon novel is preferable to none, and Inherent Vice, which seems almost preternaturally aware of its own limitations (as suggested by its title), still offers us the pleasure of his company. Yet, to paraphrase that jacket copy: If you can remember the '60s and the early '70s, and what emerged from Pynchon's head in those days, you can't forget those books—and then you … or, wait … It's impossible not to be disappointed that the Renaissance intellectual, who blended populist aspirations with the wildest of fancies and cast unnervingly instructive light on our times, has settled for such a modest diversion.
All of which suggests a cold, dark novel -- but as it happens “Inherent Vice” is Pynchon’s sunniest book. He may not have lost his pessimism, but the lethal intensity of the novels he was writing in his 20s and 30s, when his own future was still uncertain, has disappeared. And that’s a problem. For all the corruption and violence and evil that Doc turns up along the way, it never feels like very much is really at stake. The book begins to seem long.
Inherent Vice is the funniest book Pynchon has written. It's also a crazed and majestic summary of everything that makes him a uniquely huge American voice.
Against the Day took almost a decade to write but failed to recapture the crazed encyclopaedic energy of V and Gravity’s Rainbow. Inherent Vice is slighter, and all the better for it. Colourful and pleasurable, the novel sums up Doc’s vision of “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light” – a garish 1960s Enlightenment that lives on in Pynchon’s writing.
“Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.) It’s a slightly spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction, a story in which the characters smoke dope and watch “Gilligan’s Island” instead of sitting around a night club knocking back J&Bs. It’s “The Maltese Falcon” starring Cheech and Chong, “The Big Sleep” as told by the hippy-dippy weatherman. Whether you think it’s funny depends a little on whether you think Cheech and Chong and the hippy-dippy weatherman are funny for more than about two minutes. It’s funnier than Chandler, anyway.
Pynchon is brimming over with asides... chucklers that make "Inherent Vice" great entertainment. But, perhaps I need to reconsider, taking into account the man's reputation in some quarters as an American genius.
Could his new book really be a symbol-filled allegory about the nature of the modern novel, a Nabokovian joke about fiction and its ultimate meaning?
Sounds like I've been smoking some heavy-duty stuff, too. Naw, I think Pynchon's just having a blast, and we are lucky to join in.
All of Pynchon's novels since Lot 49 (yes, I'm including Gravity's Rainbow) have suffered terribly from bloat, a more-is-more grandiosity and runaway page inflation. Inherent Vice is shorter, thank heavens, but still comes in overweight. The wise-guy patter, so essential to successful noir, is lame. There are stretches where the writing clunks around like Doc's Dodge Dart. Pynchon is one of the least graceful stylists of major contemporary authors, and he does nothing to redeem that reputation here.
Still, he is a major contemporary author for a reason. More than 40 years ago he sounded notes of dire foreboding about where the culture was heading. Going back in time he essentially tells the same story, but now from the perspective of someone who wants to reconsider how it all went wrong.
I've cogitated happily for days about all the implications of "A screaming comes across the sky" (the first line in "Gravity's Rainbow"), and while it's unfair to make single sentences stand for whole books, compare the first line of "Inherent Vice": "She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to." There's simply far less pull. Strangely, since Pynchon is the master of the shaggy-dog story and nonlinear plot, it's not the language but the (by his standards) straightforward, clue-driven story that propels me through "Inherent Vice."
It's easy to forget, among all his games and puzzles, that Pynchon can write razor-sharp beauty with the best of them. A page-long description of the Santa Anas demands a place next to classic passages by Chandler and Joan Didion. In Pynchon's big books, these devastating descriptions, particularly of place, are often swept away in the tide of prose and characters. Here, in a novel that focuses on Los Angeles so sharply that Tommy's is pinpointed by its cross streets, they shine.
[A] plot best thought of as a state-of-the-art bomb that detonates, releasing dozens of bomblets that explode in turn to pierce the targets with thousands of tiny metal fragments. The reader is not just pulverized but virtually aerated. To spare my own readers, I make no attempt to put in order all the simultaneous adventures, encounters, and peculiar finds that Doc comes across. Not that I could.
When things finally resolve into one big classic Pynchon parable of conspiratorial corporate greed, the solution seems preordained and therefore totally harmless. It feels like the net of genre constraints has been torn down, which drains the game of most of its meaning. With no suspense and nothing at stake, Pynchon’s manic energy just feels like aimless invention.
[Inherent Vice] delivers at least two big surprises. The first is that it starts out as a pastiche of a well-known genre, the big-city private eye tale, though with a psychedelic twist: Pynchon's private eye is a permanently stoned hippie based in southern California, "circa 1970". The second is that it more or less stays that way, with no sustained excursions into mathematical logic or mind-bending shifts of narrative direction.
The book is exuberant, delightfully evocative of its era, and very funny—one rarely hears mention of Pynchon's wonderful feel for comedy—and it has behind it a drumbeat of warning, about the kind of society we were building then and are living in now, in which nothing is private and all the important public mysteries will remain unsolved.
Haight Ashbury is over the hill. The Beach Boys have given way to the Grateful Dead. Everything is going to pieces, the way it always does in Pynchon, but - and this is a first, I think - one improbable hero, Doc Sportello, a beach bum turned private eye (thus a "gumsandal"), is offering to fix it. Maybe I was inhaling too much at that festival, but I feel that this could be Pynchon's most deliriously enjoyable and compelling book to date.
"Inherent Vice" almost succumbs to the flaws that scuttled "Against the Day;" in the middle, it certainly founders. The narrative, as is all too typical of Pynchon's recent fiction, lumbers through a monotonous parade of indistinguishable characters, each with a silly name and one or perhaps two outlandish traits, as if selfhood were something to be ladled out in stingy portions like the gruel in "Oliver Twist"... What ultimately delivers "Inherent Vice" from this futility are the stubbornly individualistic imperatives of its borrowed genre. The detective story must resolve around a central character -- in this case, Doc -- and Pynchon has no choice but to make something of him. Because his creator is fundamentally sweet (unlike, say, Philip Marlowe's), Doc turns out all right
"Inherent Vice" has weird moments, but is for the most part a fairly conventional detective story. Doc is a counterculture Sam Spade, shaped by the hard-boiled novels and movies he loves. He could hang his eyeball signboard in any number of California tales, Kem Nunn's surfer-noir "Tapping the Source," and Northern California dope-grower novels such as T.C. Boyle's "Budding Prospects" and Denis Johnson's "Already Dead," all of which were written in Pynchon's shadow.
añadido por Shortride | editarThe Oregonian, Vernon Peterson(Jul 30, 2009)
It is in the moments away from the stoned haze of plot that this book is at its best. The sentences have their stately beauty, and Pynchon is poignantly good on the heartsick detective, his "lovelorn rectogenital throb".
Inherent Vice is Pynchon looking back on an era, caught up in its own stoned entropy, and looking back on himself, Lot 49 Redux. You don’t have to have been there; if you’re willing, he’ll take you there.
So here, quite unexpectedly, only a year or so after the publication of Against the Day, a fiction colossal at the very least in size, is another Pynchon novel. The good news is that Inherent Vice is an honorable effort indeed, and shall we say, quite Pynchonian.
[A]s with Chandler's infamously impossible-to-follow plots, sleuthing the case is hardly the point of Inherent Vice. Savor it instead for Pynchonian linguistic flights and slapstick set pieces. But the nicest surprise of all is the heart-on-sleeve wistfulness that finally peeks through the comic riffing,...The new Pynchon: a beach read and a heartstring puller. It's almost surreal.
Some of the comedy is very funny, and Pynchon’s novel is also full of superb dialogue and lovely descriptive passages that show that, at 72, the outstanding gifts that led in the 1960s and 1970s to comparisons with Joyce and Melville have not deserted him. Gone, though, are the discipline and cohesion of his early fiction. It’s a sad irony that a novel whose analysis of Reagan’s California seems to centre on forces (business, law enforcement, violence) being out of control should itself have so marked a control problem.
[I]t is probably Pynchon's most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale. And although I couldn't now reconstruct who did what to whom or why, well, no one involved in making The Big Sleep knew who killed the chauffeur either.
Unlike much of Pynchon’s other work, Inherent Vice wears its learning lightly, intermixing it with dialogue that zings, jokes that never overstay their welcome and a stream of hilariously bad puns and wickedly acute observations. Who would have thought it? One of America’s most wilful and obscure writers has produced the most enjoyable beach read of the summer.
As a detective novel, Inherent Vice, though vivid and entertaining, isn't in the first league of such books; nor is it as authentic an insider's product of the psychedelic Sixties as, say, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is minor Pynchon, but it is the perfect entry point into his work for a new generation of readers.
Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon’s developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition—yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he’s more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity’s Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight. Fans of the former will know it for the throwaway masterwork it is: playful as a dolphin, plaintive as whale song, unsoundably profound as the blue Pacific.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Under the paving-stones, the beach! Graffito, Paris, May 1968
Dedicatoria
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The clock up on the wall, which reminded Doc of elementary school back in San Joaquin, read some hour that it could not possibly be. Doc waited for the hands to move, but they didn't, from which he deduced that the clock ws broken and maybe had been for years. Which was groovy however because long ago Sortilège had taught him the esoteric skill of telling time from a broken clock. The first thing you had to do was light a joint, which in the Hall of Justice might seem odd, but surely not way back here--who knew, maybe even outside the jurisdiction of local drug enforcement--though just to be on the safe side he also lit a De Nobili cigar and filled the room with a precautionary cloud of smoke from the classic Mafia favorite. After inhaling posmoke for a while, he glanced up at the clock, and sure enough, it showed a different time now, though this could also be from Doc having forgotten where the hands were to begin with. (p.282-283)
The bars hadn't closed yet, and Denis didn't seem to be home. Keeping an ear out for funseekers in the vicinity, Doc brought the carton with the heroin inside it down into the remains of Denis's living room and hid it behind a section of collapsed ciling, draping the giant plastic rag of what had been Chico's water bed over it. Only then did he happen to notice that the carton he'd pulled out of that dumpster in the dark had once helf a twenty-five-inch color TV set, a detail he had no cause to think about till next day when he dropped in on Denis about luchtime and found him sitting, to all appearances serious and attentive, in front of the professionally packaged heroin, now out of its box, and staring at it, as it turned out he'd been doing for some time.
"It said on the box it was a television set," Denis explained.
"And you couldn't resist. Didn't you check first to see if there was something you could plug in?"
"Well I couldn't find any power cord, man, but I figured it could be some new type of set you didn't need one?"
"Uh huh and what . . ." why was he pursuing this? "were you watching, when I came in?"
"See, my theory is, is it's one of those educational channels? A little slow maybe, but no worse than high school . . ."
"Yes Denis thanks, I will just have a hit off of that if you don't mind. . . ."
"And dig it, Doc, if you watch long enough . . . see how it begins to sort of . . . change?"
Alarmingly, Doc after a minute or two did find minute modulations of color and light intensity beginning to appear among the tightly taped layers of plastic. He sat down next to Denis, and they passed the roach back and forth, eyes glued to the package. Jade/Ashley showed up with a giant Thermos full of Orange Julius and paper cups and a bag of Cheetos.
"Lunch," she greeted them, "and color-coordinated, too, and-- Whoa, what the fuck is that, it looks like smack."
"Nah," said Denis, "I think it's like a . . . documentary?"
They all sat there in a row, sipping, crunching, and gazing. Finally Doc tore himself away. "I hate to be the bad guy, but I've got to do a repo on this?"
"Just till this part's over?"
"Till we see what happens," added Jade.
(p.339-340)
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.
Reluctantly investigating a kidnapping threat against his ex-girlfriend's billionaire beau, Doc Sportello tackles a bizarre tangle of nefarious characters before stumbling on a mysterious entity that may actually be a tax shelter for a dental group.
"Se llama Sportello, Doc Sportello, y es un detective privado un tanto peculiar en el colorista Los ngeles de finales de los aos sesenta. Haca ya tiempo que Doc no vea a su ex, Shasta, seductora femme fatale, cuando sta recurre a sus servicios porque ha desaparecido su nuevo amante, un magnate inmobiliario que haba visto la luz del buen karma, un tanto distorsionada por el cido, y quera devolver a la sociedad todo lo que haba expoliado. Sportello se ve enredado entonces en una intriga en la que los escrpulos chispean por su ausencia y cuya trama es casi la de una novela negra clsica. A partir de ah, Thomas Pynchon pergea un retrato desbocado de una California poblada por surfistas embriagados de la mitologa de las olas gigantes, combatientes de Vietnam o agentes del FBI reconvertidos en hippies, pandillas carcelarias, la escabrosa sombra de Charlie Manson y sus aclitas, una brutal organizacin secreta de dentistas, polis corruptos, una protointernet o bellas masajistas de sexualidad ambigua. Todo sazonado con dilogos y guios hilarantes, al ritmo de una frentica banda sonora que sirve de rquiem psicodlico por una poca que pudo ser y no fue"--Cover p. 4.
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