The Counterforce

Thomas Pynchon's detective novel Inherent Vice has a cult following. Its narrator, a private investigator known as Doc, carries the leftover idealism of the 1960s into a murky present, often while under the influence of drugs. He drifts off course while trying to work out what happened to a missing property developer. J. M. Tyree follows the novel's knotted storylines and its dreamlike, intoxicated prose. Across his work, Pynchon imagines a counterforce of misfits and dreamers searching for a more humane world. Tyree shows how the clues in this paranoid thriller, set in Nixon-era Los Angeles, connect to harmful national myths that still shape America. Each chapter is built around something Pynchon opposes, including werewolves, sobriety, linear time, and Hollywood. Tyree also defends the liberties Paul Thomas Anderson took in his film adaptation of the novel. Tyree's central argument is that if another past was possible, as Pynchon suggests, then a different future may be possible too. The book is a guide to Pynchon's unusual historical fiction. It contends that facts alone cannot save us and that we need better stories.