Like many a Pynchon protagonist before him, Sportello is on a doomed quest. Pynchon’s novels are always more or less picaresque journeys; his characters travel perpetually, but rarely arrive anywhere meaningful. What Gravity’s Rainbow calls “the terrible politics of the Grail” means that quests in Pynchon are inevitable and also inevitable failures. At best, they will be mock-heroic; at worst, they will be tragic, but they will never succeed. Inherent Vice may be Pynchon’s most overtly nostalgic book, featuring a character overcome by a longing he pretends to shrug off.
Remarkably, Inherent Vice features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognizable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarize as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale. And although I couldn’t now reconstruct who did what to whom or why, well, no one involved in making The Big Sleep knew who killed the chauffeur either.
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