Thomas Pynchon Teaser

I’ve just received my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, scheduled for release on August 4th. Although I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, this excerpt from the beginning of chapter two will give you a good sense of the world of the novel:

Doc took the freeway out. The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer!—all this time it had really been going on up north.

The technicolor sets, quick-paced action, and slick prose crammed into the first two chapters hint at the wild ride ahead. Check back for a review in a week or two.