The Last Book I Read

Back when I was in college I took a fiction writing class with a young prof (actually, probably a grad student in the English Department), and he assigned a number of modern writers for us to read to spark our own creative juices. There, I was introduced to the likes of Donald Barthelme, Max Apple, John Barth and Italo Calvino. The teacher also raved about Thomas Pynchon, though I don't recall him assigning anything by Pynchon for us to read. After the class was over, though, I picked up a copy of Gravity's Rainbow, widely acclaimed as Pynchon's masterpiece at the time (maybe still, though he's published a fair number of other novels since), got about forty or so pages into it and gave up. Every few years since, at least three or four times, I've started it again, rarely even making it back to where I first set it aside. It's been a long time since I took a shot, and maybe I'll give it another try after finishing (quite quickly and easily) Pynchon's newest book, Inherent Vice. This is a detective yarn on the model of Raymond Chandler, except the heroic PI is a hippie, with a story set in 1970 just after the revelations of the Manson family murders. Larry "Doc" Sportello is an avid doper, a rock and roll fan, and a dabbler in the weird spiritual beliefs of his assorted friends and acquaintances, all of which contributes to the various hassles and insights that propel him through the case. It definitely is a less dense experience than Gravity's Rainbow, but it may kind of explain something about Pynchon's mindset at the time he was penning that book (which came out back in the seventies), if it's fair to assume his depiction of LA at the end of the sixties comes from first-hand experience. If I had to identify a main theme of Inherent Vice, it would be that given the myriad choices confronting all of us, it would be foolish to assume there is only one path to enlightenment; or to put it slightly differently, enlightenment takes many forms, and there's no guarantee that any particular path will get you there. If that sounds unnecessarily mystical, well, that's kind of what the book is about too-- making me think that my difficulties with Gravity's Rainbow may have been in my desire to find in it some straight line of coherent plotting, while Pynchon just wanted to take me on a ride. Whether I'm on to something there or not, I think I'll give that old book another try and see if this perspective doesn't help me over the tough spots. Since I enjoyed Inherent Vice, and bought into its particular realism of a certain time and place, I'm thinking that Pynchon may be more accessible than I originally gave him credit for, if I just employ a little more patience than I had thirty years ago.