Inherent Vice discussion

It took me a while to remember how to read Thomas Pynchon. Unlike most other novels, Pynchon's fiction is not about character development or plot. In fact it's almost impossible to remember who the characters are or what's supposed to be "going on" in the story except for the most basic of premises: somebody disappeared. Our narrator is supposedly looking for him. It's set in LA in the late sixties, but the what the book is really about is the vision of TV, Hollywood, Pop Culture, Drug Culture alternate reality that flowers in Pynchon's mind when he thinks about that time and place. And it's about reading passages like this one: "Doc knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business.They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed o end and the faithless money-drive world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent. out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen."... in other words, corporate honchos 'just doing their job.'

Literary fiction should always be more about ideas and distinct aesthetic experiences than concrete plots or characters. The label is just used more broadly these days because most people, whether they're in the industry or readers, have no patience for anything that isn't strictly marketable as a "story" in the basic sense.

Too true. The emphasis is on "story." Readers don't care how you write it (or so I am told), they just want to be caught up in your story.... Nevertheless many of us still read for the literary pleasure of the work, or as you put it, aesthetic experiences. In addition to ideas, for me it's style, narrative voice, the fun and challenge of masterful language.