I'm still re-reading Inherent Vice, but there is one comment I wanted to make.

Some reviews compared it to The Big Lebowski and even The Long Goodbye (the Altman film, not the Chandler book). There are obvious similarities, as I indicated before, but there's also a big difference. Both Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe and the Dude are men out of their time, out of step with the world around them.

Inherent Vice, however, is about the brief period when a lot of people shared Doc Sportello's ideas and ideals and habits. In fact, it's about the exact moment when that began to change, so in that way it's much more like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It even has its own version of "the wave speech" (on page 254, where it talks about "...Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find his way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness... how a certain hand might reach terribly out of the darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good."). And that scene takes place as he's in a motel, with at least one television on, on his way back from (of all places) Las Vegas.

Thompson was writing at his best in the early 1970s, which was very well indeed. But Pynchon, the old paranoid (and with many years of hindsight that Thompson didn't have, since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was written at the tail end of the process in question), is much clearer about the fact that the wave didn't just roll back; there was also somebody pushing.

I finished Inherent Vice, and it was quite enjoyable. I didn't worry too much about the plot, but now I'm curious. The story was very complex (or complicated), with a lot of characters, and I have no idea if it all makes sense or not. And, if it does make sense, is it worth the effort of figuring it out?

So, I'm going to read it again, and we'll see what happens.

Also, it made me think about missing-person mystery stories in general. I've been watching John Ford's The Searchers, which is (among other things) a missing-person story. Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley (the "searchers" of the title) travel all over the western United States, and into Mexico and Canada, over many years, tracking a missing girl.

Because that's the thing about missing-person stories. Murder mysteries are centered around a dead body. Everything radiates out from there. (Obviously, cases with multiple murders are more complex, but the same general point still applies.) Missing-person stories don't have a center, so they often cover a lot of ground.

Farewell My Lovely
The Mother Hunt
The Big Lebowski
The Moving Target
B is for Burglar
Inherent Vice

I think Jan Sleet should solve a missing-person case.

On another front, I'm glad I did the vampire story when I did, since vampires have now become such a fad. I believe there are two different vampire shows on TV these days, plus all the novels and the movies and so on.

Of course, the fact that I'm rather sick of the whole idea does not extend to the fact that Johnny Depp is going to star in a big-screen remake of Dark Shadows (whoo hoo!), and it doesn't extend to Let the Right One In, which is still a great movie.

Oh, and I should mention that the method of evading the truth that is used in The Golden Mystery (specifically here) is an old Quaker trick. I always thought it was a rather silly distinction myself, but obviously it's important to some people.

Also, I just found this article (I found it in the hard copy magazine, and had some trouble finding it online because they changed the title). I agree with the premise, of course, since I've been doing more or less the same thing for nearly twenty years now (only not on Twitter, and with fiction rather than jokes, but the idea is the same).