For insurers and preservationists, "inherent vice" describes the innate tendency of precious objects to deteriorate and refers to the limits of insurability and conservation it suggests that matter (and thus, by extension, materialism) carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The book's title provides Pynchon with a new metaphor for three of his oldest preoccupations: entropy, capitalism, and religion, specifically Puritanism. Together, the three novels trace an arc from the mid-1960s to the Reaganite 1980s, from the birth of counterculture to the triumph of corporate culture, as the frontier closes for good and the long descent into betrayal and greed begins. In all three novels, California represents the final frontier of the American Dream and the last stand against corrupt institutions, the ultimate refuge of aimless dreamers riding waves of hope – and fear. Set in the waning days of the era of free love, as Charles Manson brings a paranoid ending to quixotic dreams, Pynchon's seventh novel bridges The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990), forming a loose trilogy traversed by the same (marginal) characters and (central) concerns, not to mention a permeating 60s dope haze. I n Thomas Pynchon's 1973 book, Gravity's Rainbow, a character sings a song called "My Doper's Cadenza", which could serve as both soundtrack and subtitle for Inherent Vice.
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