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Inherent Vice
- Narrated by: Ron McLarty
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
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Editorial reviews
This book is a classic Pynchon novel except that it's completely accessible, unlike his actual classic, Gravity's Rainbow. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield titled his review of Inherent Vice "The Bigger Lebowski", and this is absolutely the truth, convincingly supported by the fact that Ron McLarty's voice work here could easily be mistaken for Jeff Bridges. Pynchon's hippie hero is Larry "Doc" Sportello, a private dick whose skills of detection are not so much hard-boiled as drug-addled. McLarty's low, gritty tones are a perfect fit for Doc's pot-smoked antics in this filmic noir.
When Sportello's ex-girlfriend turns to him for help in anticipation of her billionaire boyfriend's future kidnapping, things quickly and naturally get complicated in the winter of 1970. Let's just say it involves a motley crew of surfers, strippers, junkies, scammers, hippies, and loonies, a shady posse known as the Golden Fang that are either mafioso or dentists, 20 kilos of heroin, and a coffin full of funny money with Nixon's face on it. Of course, the Sherlock Holmes to Doc's Watson and also the perpetual rain on his parade is straight-laced cop cowboy Bigfoot Bjornsen. Bigfoot and Doc's fundamentally different worldviews put them in constant conflict on the same case, leaning on one another while stepping on each other's toes. McLarty doesn't miss a beat in his portrayal of their hilarious and timeless debate between authoritarianism and communalism.
There are trademark Pynchon motifs throughout the story that devotees of the author will be glad to see. The Southern California setting is where Pynchon is at his very best, and his deep knowledge of music is definitely in evidence. McLarty is even forced to sing several surf rock tunes, which he does with surprising alacrity. There is the author's usual consideration of race wars and imperialism, where McLarty does convincing Hispanic and Asia-Pacific accents of various kinds common to the region. There is the extensive set of acronyms and anagrams, where McLarty somehow manages not to laugh while referring to things like the hippy-busting cop squad known as "P-DIDdies", short for "Public Disorder Intelligence Division".
This is Pynchon at his most readable, and he sticks to driving the plot with relatively few digressions. Still, this is also Pynchon at his most recognizable. Though the tale is finely tuned to resemble such cult gems as The Big Lebowski, no other author could have cranked it out quite so colorfully. Thomas Pynchon isn't taking any easy outs with this one. He took a beloved story and crafted a fleshy parallel, which Ron McLarty lovingly gives voice to a style that will not disappoint even the most die-hard fans of either Pynchon or Lebowski. Megan Volpert
Publisher's summary
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era.
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't there.
It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic '60s in LA, and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy", except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.
Critic reviews
"What he does, and brilliantly, is open windows onto a universe where we're all in custody, but we're none of us sure who put on the cuffs...entertainment of a high order.” (TIME)
"An enjoyable book by a writer whose work can be daunting.” (John Powers, Fresh Air on NPR)
“With whip-smart, psychedelic-bright language, Pynchon manages to convey the Sixties - except the Sixties were never really like this. This is Pynchon's world, and it's brilliant. The resolution is as crisp as Doc is laid-back. Highly recommended.” (The Library Journal)
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Reeling from change? Or ready to make some changes in your life? These wise words from authors just might give you the comfort or boost you need. Their words reflect the nature of change and the swirl of feelings surrounding it—from fear to exhilaration. In this collection, you'll find gentle reminders that change will keep happening and reassurance that you can handle it. When you face it and embrace it, change can enrich your life in unexpected ways.
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Story
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
- Essays and Arguments
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Paul Garcia
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.
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Wonderful book, terrible narration!
- By Karen on 08-20-13
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The Pale King
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
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The King is dead, long live the King!
- By Darwin8u on 10-31-16
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Consider the Lobster
- And Other Essays
- By: David Foster Wallace
- Narrated by: David Foster Wallace, Robert Petkoff
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures.
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How this differs from the other version
- By Jonathan Penley on 12-26-17
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo
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JR
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering it's own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
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Possibly superior as an audio book
- By Peregrine on 12-12-10
By: William Gaddis
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Less Than Zero
- By: Bret Easton Ellis
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and reenters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin.
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How one wishes this writer was without talent!
- By Darwin8u on 09-21-13
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Americana
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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At 28, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a high-powered television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And then the dream - and the dream making - become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality.
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DeLillo's Grand First Step
- By Darwin8u on 06-29-17
By: Don DeLillo
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Collected Fictions
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - translator
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Abridged
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From his 1935 debut with "The Universal History of Iniquity", through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.
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Good but incomplete
- By Aaron on 12-17-18
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
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The Black Dahlia
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 15, 1947, the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history.
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Great naration
- By Grasshopper.Craig on 09-10-06
By: James Ellroy
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Antkind
- A Novel
- By: Charlie Kaufman
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 25 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed.
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A wild ride, a fever dream, a social satire
- By barbara on 09-10-20
By: Charlie Kaufman
What listeners say about Inherent Vice
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Amazon fan
- 09-13-09
Really funny
By far the most accessible of Pynchon's books and really funny. The author has a great ear for the hippy dippy speech of the 70's and the narrator nails it perfectly.
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- C. Daniels
- 06-08-20
Funny, nostalgic, weird, and dark
I first read this book a few days after it was published. At the time I thought it was a bit too easy to read for a Thomas Pynchon novel. Now I’ve been through it a few times picking up new details with every reread. It just keeps getting better. And listening to Ron McLarty as a Doc Sportello just makes it that much better.
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- Andrew Cohen
- 06-30-22
Terrible audio book of a GREAT novel & film
I love this crime fiction novel by Thomas Pynchon, but the audio book is so bad I cannot give it a five star review on Audible.
The narrator takes odd liberties with the characters & the actual verbiage, to a point where I can't help myself from wondering what got in the way of this narrator from making a wonderful audible version of this incredible work fo whodunnit stoner fiction, and how/why did the creators and publishers accept this result?! It's just terrible. His caricature of Tariq Khalil is inaccurate and ignorant; his Doc Sportello is dimensionless and void; his female voices are mostly one note, save for Jade who is made to sound pretentious and ignorant, again inaccurate for either the novel or the movie.
I wonder is this narrator trying add his own subtle interpretations? The characters all strike me as desperately improvised and the reading as a whole is completely disjointed from the five interconnecting plot lines of the actual story. This narrator is incapable of appreciating the intelligence of anyone in the story besides the cops, with whom he imbues an extra amount of hefty force which lands like a thud against the otherwise colorful cast of characters caught in the bog of Gordita Beach. This narrator is caught in a bog someplace very far away from CA in the 70s...
The story doesn't even come through well because the way this guy reads it, the lurking zeitgeist of the whole novel is completely obliterated when the characters such a poor reading with liberties taken by the narrator, further undermining the subtleties of Pynchon.
I am picky for narrators, and this one I do not pick. I am a teacher and I am literally telling you I would rather you start with the film as a true to the novel interpretation, as opposed to the audiobook which may make you hate the entire world of IV.
One favorite part of reading the novel for me were the songs. Pynchon is great at crafting in these song lyrics that may or may not mean anything relative to the plot, characters, or sometimes they're just Macguffins. But in the audiobook, we have to listen to this clown sing the song lyrics every time, void of context, and he drones on through with a fragile, clearly non-singer's voice, and we are subjected to this for whole songs in a few cases. If I hadn't read and seen it on my own first, I would be so heavily annoyed by these renditions that I would return the title on Audible.
TL;DNR: This is my favorite novel and the audiobook is not up to par in my opinion. I highly recommend reading the actual novel and seeing the film if you have the option to do so.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-18-09
Martin Cruz Smith on acid
I thought it was brilliant and pitch-perfect. But I guess I'm in the minority. Think Martin Cruz Smith's parade of Muscovites, not on vodka, but blue cheer.
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- DVF
- 05-22-23
loved it and very good
great story and loved the setting and time in which it took place. Doc sportello is probably one of my favorite characters as well as being one of the most annoying and sometimes so duuuuh from being stoned it's frustrating but it never effects the story. at times it's almost as if he's doing a stoner Columbo before Columbo was even a show on tv lol. but I loved the not so chill undertones from doc when Shasta is around despite is hippie all the time vibes. thought Bigfoot was an interesting character, and at the same time you wanna hate him, he knows doc isn't as dumb as he seems despite all he says to the contrary. but a very interesting and well written story that I was a little unsure of buying at first but this is one of those times I tool a chance and was rewarded with a great piece of material. loved the story, thought the performance and overall way the narrator tells the story and speaks as the characters was great too. definitely highly recommend this one.
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- Tommy M.
- 10-29-09
It's like the 60's man!
An excellant recreation of a time that's hard to believe unless you lived through it. A good story is told with a great sense of humour!
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1 person found this helpful
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- PickyPicky
- 11-30-12
Great protagonist, Dude!
Surprising that the pothead PI is so timely. Very enjoyable character, who at bottom is a straight arrow while accepting of every kind of person, crook or cop, in his inimitable laid-back weed-softened way.
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- Jane Maserik
- 11-25-18
Ron McLarty is perfect for this book
Love Pynchon. Loved this book. Ron McLarty is the perfect narrator for this book. He makes the characters come alive and really sets the scene/pace. I wish he did more of Pynchon's work (as some of the narrators are rather wretched). If you like Pynchon, then this is a no-brainer. If you don't know who Pynchon is but you do like clever writing with real characters who mess up just as much as you do in your own life--then you need to read this book (or at least have it read to you by the masterful Ron McLarty).
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-05-21
My favorite Pynchon novel rendered beautifully
I've listened to this performance twice now. Ron Mclarty does a wonderful job narrating and singing, bringing Pynchon's zany characters and universe to hazy life.
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- Molly
- 05-05-10
Great, despite a slow start
This is a great book; would love to read it now that I have listened to it. A word of warning, however: the beginning is slow and it takes a little while to get into it. But have patience! It is well worth it.
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1 person found this helpful