Tori Amos performed solo on her early tours, just her and her piano, with occasional assistance from Steve Caton on guitar. I never saw her during those years, but I have watched the Live from New York video many times.

She is, of course, an incredible stage performer, but there are moments in that concert where she becomes, shall we say, a tiny bit self-indulgent. You can see her think, "Oooh, this is an interesting note. Maybe I should see how long I can hold it... and I bet I could get a real cool screechy effect right here, too."

I first saw her on the next tour, the first one with a full band, and there was none of that. You have a band, you have restrictions. You can't just decide to pause all of a sudden because it seems like a groovy idea (especially when you have a rhythm section like hers, which is not exactly nimble).

The interesting part is that I saw her quite a few times after that, mostly solo (I was always inclined more toward the solo tours, since you may have been able to discern my opinion of her rhythm section), and she never went back to the self-indulgent stuff that annoyed me before. Leading a band gave her discipline, and she's kept that discipline ever since.

I'm re-reading Vineland, the Thomas Pynchon novel that Inherent Vice is most often compared to. It's surprising what a mess it is. The things I disliked about it are pretty much as I remember them (I'll write more about this when I'm done), and there are some wonderful things that I'd forgotten. But it's very loose. You start out thinking it's going to be about Zoyd Wheeler, but then we wander off (as if the author starts to find Zoyd about as annoying as this reader did) following other characters, each one of whom gets a long backstory. I'm about two-thirds of the way through, and basically nothing has happened since the first chapter, just lots of history filled in.

Which is different from the Hitchcock example I mention in this post. In Family Plot, the story continues to move, just in a different direction than you expected. In Vineland, it pretty much stops.

Inherent Vice, on the other hand, is quite tight. There are flashbacks and backstory, but they're limited and focused; and the book generally moves forward, with things continuing to happen. Because for writers, genre restrictions are pretty much like getting a rhythm section. As Paul Anderson said in his commentary track for Resident Evil Extinction, "In a zombie picture, you can have a little romance, but then you have to get back to killing zombies." With a mystery, you have to line up your questions and start to answer them.

Which is what I've found, I guess. My first novel, A Sane Woman, is a mystery, and it's really short (it wasn't until I started laying it out in print that I realized how short it is – barely a novel at all by some measures).

U-town is not a mystery (though it contains one), and it is (shall we say) somewhat longer, and it does meander around quite a bit. Ditto the third novel, and an argument could be made that they are really just two halves of one novel (which would then be over 800 pages if printed).

But now I'm writing mysteries, and suddenly it's easy to be much more concise. Having a genre structure keeps things focused (assuming you're taking the genre seriously), and it also solves the problem that Robert Altman identified about "endings" (I quoted him here).

Where is the end of the story? How can you tell when it's over? Well, with a mystery, the story is over when the mystery is solved. That way, you don't end up like Michael Douglas's character in Wonder Boys, whose unfinished novel ends up well over 1,000 pages because he can't stop writing it.

I'm not saying, by the way, that all mysteries need to be solved. David Lynch, for example, frequently uses the form of a mystery, but he usually doesn't provide any answers. This often works really well (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, the first season of Twin Peaks). But he's just using the form, he's not really writing mysteries. Inherent Vice is the real thing (though it's obviously a lot more as well).

(On, and a couple of days ago I did an entry about Christy. You can scroll down to read it, or click on the link over to the right.)

I was going to write that Inherent Vice has more gay people in it than any of Pynchon's earlier novels (with the usual caveat that I only made it 200 pages into Against the Day), but as I thought about it I realized that something much more interesting is going on.

There are really no "gay people" in Inherent Vice. What the book actually shows is a time and place when people didn't feel a need to declare their sexuality one way or the other (or another), when people felt free to experiment and do whatever they felt like at any given moment.

Spoilers follow.

There's Jade/Ashley and Bambi, who met and became lovers in prison, who live together (with a cat named "Anaïs," which is a nice touch), but who also go on double dates with rock musicians, plus Jade/Ashley apparently has some sort of thing going with Denis.

There's Puck and Einar, who live together (also after meeting and becoming lovers in prison), but Puck also has an ongoing relationship with Trillium and Einar considerately steps out when she comes over.

Puck and Trillium get married, with "Einar acting as best man and deciding himself to elope with another groom-to-be who'd been waiting for a bride with what turned out to be cold feet, as, in fact, he discovered with signs of relief, were his own."

(Things end badly for Puck and Trillium, of course, but I think the lesson there is more, "Don't marry guys with swastikas tattooed on their heads.")

And there's also Sloane and Luz, who become lovers when Mickey goes missing, staking out the Wolfmann marital bed as their own territory. Until, of course, Mickey returns and reclaims his position and rights as patriarch of the household. But when Sloane and Luz are together it doesn't interfere with Luz having a fling with Doc (and there's also Luz's possible boyfriend, but that's only Doc's deduction–it's not proved one way or the other). And of course there's also some joking that Doc is titillated by the thought of Sloane and Luz together, though that seems to pale beside his fetish for "Manson chicks."

Nobody declares that they're "gay" or "straight" or "bisexual," or feels any apparent pressure to make any sort of declarations. The only explicit statement at all is Puck's mention of Detective Indelicato's "hatred of homos." Clearly, the open spirit of experimentation doesn't extend to the LAPD.

And this is a specific instance of what Pynchon refers to in broader terms at the end, where Doc is driving through a thick fog and thinks that it might spread and settle in regionwide. "Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he'd have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody."

He wants the fog to roll away and reveal another world, where people are not divided into all sorts of categories but instead can just be people.

This is related to what I've done in my writing. Vicki is gay, but she doesn't make any proclamations about it, and in fact we get through a whole novel with her before we even learn what her preference is. The only time she refers to her sexuality at all (except in private conversation with Jan or Marshall) is in the chapter "A Different Choice", where she calls herself a dyke, but that's to make a point to her mother. Which is "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam," more or less.

And I guess the flip side is SarahBeth, who does declare that she's gay (whether or not anybody asks), but doesn't see why that should mean she can't have a boyfriend if she wants to.

There is one American writer, however, whose fiction is the literary equivalent of a vast box set: a blissful, bizarro anthology of rock, jazz, pop, blues, country, show tunes, novelty numbers, you name it. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are like a giant jukebox just waiting to happen. Some of the songs are real, some are imaginary. All of them Pynchon makes his own. No other American writer has put so much music into his fiction.

Hmmm. That's from this article. Is that why I enjoy Pynchon so much? Well, no, I think there's more to it.

But it is a factor, I'm sure of that.

I've started to post on the Inherent Vice wiki. So, after years of very limited Wikipedia participation (I made edits to one article once), mostly because Wiki Markup Language annoys me because it seems arbitrarily different from HTML, I'm finally having to learn how these things work.

Oh, and noted jazz enthusiast "Uncle Mike" Sheldon is featured in this week's installment of the story "Carly."

Later: Of course, my specific enthusiasm for Inherent Vice may just be as simple as the fact that a writer I really like suddenly decided to write a mystery, and (of course) I'm now writing mysteries. But I think it's more than that, too.

(I am tempted to say that Thomas Pynchon is my "favorite writer," but I don't feel that I've read enough to have a favorite writer. When I say that Robert Altman is my favorite director, as I do here, I have at least seen a lot of movies. By the way, it did surprise me, in searching for the post I linked to above, how many times I have mentioned Altman in this blog – though I don't know why I should be surprised.)

Also, as in this entry, the New York Times blog After Deadline just mentioned another of my favorite rules:

[Caption] Mike L. has remained a father to a daughter that wasn’t really "his."

Use "who" for people, not "that."

Yup.