![]() ![]() But there’s a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. ![]() Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard’s exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. More fertile still is Pynchon’s unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Big’s strings is always a villain even bigger. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. ![]() It all starts with Pynchon’s least conspicuous intro ever: “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to”-she being Doc’s old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. We’re in early-’70s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon’s recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away. Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry “Doc” Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. ![]()
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