Inherent Vice

The intellectual game-play is characteristically dazzling...colourful and pleasurable

Financial Times

Pynchon leaves the rest of the American literary establishment at the starting gate...the range over which he moves is extraordinary, not simply in terms of ideas explored but also in the range of emotions he takes you through

Time Out

The most important and mysterious writer of his generation

Time

Throughout Pynchon's style is spot-on, capturing what Hunter S Thompson called the high, wild sound of the era, a sense of enthusiasm and boundless opportunity, even though you know the times are changing, and not necessarily in your favour...Pychon continues to draw his inspiration from genre fiction and pulp. Its more fun this way

Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

Often very funny...may be his most readable novel. Remarkably, it features both a sympathetic protagonist and a recognisable plot, albeit one that is as impossible to summarise as any other Pynchon shaggy dog tale

Sarah Churchwell, The Observer

One of America's most wilful and obscure writers has produced the most enjoyable beach read of the summer

Tim Martin, Saturday Telegraph

It is all a bit silly, really, but handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, is as much fun to read as anything you will come across this summer

Nicholas Lezard, London Evening Standard

Full of superb dialogue and lovely descriptive passages'

John Dugdale, Sunday Times

By far [Pynchon's] most accessible novel since The Crying of Lot 49, and at least as funny as his zany behemoth Against the Day...this is a loveable, kooky version of noir detective fiction, but with the shadows of genuine darkness at its edges...Inherent Vice is Pynchon on an idiosyncratic frolic, and what a joy it is. He is the only truly Dickensian talent of our time

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

True believers will be relieved to note, however, that despite its concessions to readability and fun, Inherent Vice has all the trademark Pynchon silliness...beneath all this mayhem and fun, however, Inherent Vice is a serious, even brooding, book

Aravind Adiga, The Times

a bright, breezy, funny page-turner...Best of all, however, is the way Pynchon maps the psycho-geography and shifting socio-political sands of America at the time

Alan Chadwick, Metro

Inherent Vice has more heart than any other Pynchon ... an anatomy or perhaps an astrology of hipness ... sun-kissed, psychedelic and sexually-enhanced, Pynchon has re-embodied, re-grooved the soul of the Sixties

Andy Martin, Independent

You don't have to have been there; if you're willing, he'll take you there

Michael Carlson, Spectator

Pynchon's pastiche is pitch-perfect, and extremely funny... the novel works superbly as a thriller. But we also get a brilliantly lurid snapshot of a world starting to unravel

Henry Power, Literary Review

The [novel's] sentences have their stately beauty, and Pynchon is poignantly good on the heartsick detective... There are tremendously pacy comic set pieces... and a nostalgic delight in 1960s types

David Flusfeder, New Statesman

Like all Pynchon's novels, short or long, it is an almost hermetically sealed world, which you can navigate best by surrendering to authorial sensibilities....Inherent Vice is Pynchon looking back at an era, caught up in its own stoned entropy, and looking back on himself...You don't have to have been there; if you're willing, he'll take you there

Michael Carlson, The Spectator

With his most accessible book to date - half Chinatown, half Fear and loathing, all searing jeremiad about the modern American Soil - he may have come up with something even th e British literati can read

Thomas Leveritt, Independent on Sunday

[An] absorbing and frequently funny crime novel...unmistakably Pynchon; as funny, angry and wistful as ever

TLS

Handled with an affable, zonked-out yet penetrating prose, [this] is as much fun as anything you will come across this summer

Nicholas Lezard, The Scotsman

The experience of reading the novel is probably as close to getting stoned as reading a novel can be. It brings on fits of the giggles and paranoia jags...It doesn't, however, make you fall asleep...characteristically hilarious and thought-provoking

Thomas Jones, London Review of Books

Tremendously enjoyable

Matt Thorne, Catholic Herald

Thomas Pynchon...blended Chandler-esque noir with pastoral comedy

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

The pioneering work in a genre you'd have to call psychedelic Noir ...Who writes sentences as beautiful as Pynchon?

Sam Leith, Daily Mail

Phantasmagorical

Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph

Serves up the author's trademark blend of pop culture, conspiracy theories and quirky characters

Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times, Fiction Books of the Year

His most relaxed and enjoyable work since Gravity's Rainbow

Morgan Kelly, Irish Times, Books of the Year

Presiding genius of American weird fiction

The Telegraph, Review Magazine

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

Guardian

Brilliant and brain boggling by turns

Daily Mail

Inherent Vice works brilliantly as both a neon-lit noir and as a psychedelic lament to the Sixties

Sunday Telegraph

Hilarious and thought-provoking

London Review of Books

A warm and joyous read. There is softness about this book, but also a tinge of melancholy

Billy O’Callaghan, Irish Examiner