Is it a New York thing? Menand has reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” for “The New Yorker,” and I think he’s generally got a handle on it — although I don’t concur with his assessment that it’s fluff, I understand how he might say so.
But I think he’s got LA and noir entirely wrong. From the middle of the review:
Pynchon’s novel is set in Los Angeles, which is by no means a departure from hardboiled tradition. This is partly because mystery writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they were), and so have lived near Hollywood, and also because movie and television crime stories have been shot in and around L.A. for a century, since it’s cheaper not to travel. Marlowe and Archer both work in L.A. So does Walter Mosley’s detective, Easy Rawlins. Southern California, in real life a place of few dark alleys and little weather, is bona-fide noir territory.
As Richard Rayner’s new book “A Bright and Guilty Place” shows, mystery and noir and Hollywood didn’t coincide because of happenstance and wannabe screenwriters but because of the cycle of crime, corruption and reform that was at the core of the city’s public life in the 1920s and ’30s. We have lots of dark alleys, thank you very much, and it’s exactly the contrast between the brilliant sunlight and our morally dank actions that gives noir its power.
Later, Menand writes that Pynchon’s protagonist, Doc:
does walk down mean streets (or the L.A. equivalent: bikers, drug dealers, sex-club performers, nefarious dentists) and is not himself mean.
Here Menand refers to the quote from Raymond Chandler with which he’d started the piece: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” But Chandler was himself referring to Los Angeles, the city at the center of much of his work. The parenthetical should not read “the LA equivalent” but “the PYNCHON equivalent” — because the dentists here are no more nefarious than they are anywhere else.
Los Angeles is an enormous, complicated city, and I don’t know if anyone can get it exactly right. But it pains me when someone as smart as Louis Menand doesn’t seem to try, instead recycling old thin cliches.
WORD.