Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is no simple piece of nostalgia, as some critics complained upon its release, but an examination of a problem – that is, the consumerist tendencies – at the heart of ’60s counterculture. In a 1974 letter, Pynchon discusses an upcoming rally for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, suggesting that it will be more of a social event for the fashionably leftist than a politically engaged expression of outrage: “Maybe I am wrong not to show up, after all think of all that great neurotic pussy that always shows up at things like — oh, aww, gee Mary, I’m sorry! I meant ‘vagina,’ of course!—like that, and all the biggies who’ll be there… .”
The hippies, as Pynchon suggests, were in the process of being absorbed into the world they oppose, becoming just another subset of the larger community. They might wear the clothes, listen to the music, take the drugs and attend the political rallies, but they do so in a spirit that subverts the very hope that hippie culture originally represented for those of a certain disposition, Pynchon apparently one of them. They are, as Brock Vond puts it in Vineland, “amateurs, consumers, short attention spans, out there for the thrills, pick up a chick, score some dope, nothing political”.
“Inherent Vice’s Two Directions”, Albert Rolls
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