This may have gotten more stars if I had not gotten distracted, moved and had big gaps in between readings. I did enjoy the writing and the characters but it either had an ambiguous ending or I just didn't pay enough attention to get it. May have to revisit this at a more focused time. ( )

The underlying mystery of this story has potential. I was intrigued and wanted to know why the guy disappeared, who murdered the other guy, and where did the girl go. However, the execution was awful. The story is set in the early 70's and the author was too wrapped up in proving that his PI main character was a drugged out hippie. The vernacular was absurd and distracting. I had to use context and description to understand the dialogue. The pacing was awful as well. There would be a few pages that the story came through, I started to become invested and interested in what was happening and then BOOM! The author was lost in reminding that "this is the 70s, we're in the 70s, this pot is some serious pot, let's smoke a joint and then another joint oh and did I mention it was the 70s? I wish it were the 60s but it's the 70s . We're in the 70s. 70s!!!!!!!" I got to the point where I would skip a half of page of writing or even two pages and was able to pick up the story within two sentences. By the end, I just didn't care and was just thankful that I was finally finished ( )

I'm sure it's me, but I just couldn't stay with this book. I got distracted and read 2 or 3 books while still in this one. Odd, because it's the kind of book I had expected to like -- smart, private eye, etc. I'm going to read it again in a couple years to see if it has the same effect. ( )

Decent read, but to be honest also a bit disappointing. I expected more of Pynchon. ( )

...and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness... how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.

Pynchon's funniest and I think most accessible book. But it's driven by the same themes as his others — the animus of the Elect toward the Preterite, the entrenchment and corrupting essence of power, and the everyday instances of grace and humor that constitute a disorganized resistance. Pynchon's lens in IV is the "long, sad history of L.A. land use... Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq's neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates": colonizations and usurpations and repossession and redevelopment. Doc navigates these disputed spaces in a haze of marijuanasmoke, the ultimate stoner P.I., trusting to intuition and happenstance to make some kind of sense out of the chaos.

Maybe it's because I've seen the movie four or five times since I first read this, but it actually mostly made sense this time around. Having some idea at least what was going on, I was able to chill and absorb the warmth of the writing, the radiant affection the novel has for its setting, mingled with longing for what might be and might have been. Lemuria symbolizes this lost Pacific Eden, dormant under the water like the lagan, the contraband submerged for later retrieval by the schooner Golden Fang and other dubious vessels. Sortilège is Lemuria's chief channeler:

"I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it's all this rain, but we're starting to have the same dreams. We can't find a way to return to Lemuria, so it's returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean — 'hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain't it..."
"It talked to you guys?"
"I don't know. It isn't just a place."

But, thinks Doc to himself later,

What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they'd been exiled from too long ago to remember.

Sprinkled in, too, are ironically and characteristically Pynchonian foreshadowings, as Aunt Reet the realtor prophecies realtor.com in an early scene, and Fritz futzes with the nascent ARPAnet in aid of Doc's investigations ("...any excuse to feel like I'm surfin the wave of the future here..."). But Doc can see what's up: "so when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz? [...] Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn't want us to see? Why should information be any different?" Wolfmann's Channel View Estates are well named, honoring the "toobfreex" Doc meets in a Vegas motel and presaging, too, YouTube's ubiquity.

Like all great L.A. stories, IV is full of weather too, the Santa Anas messing with the dope-addled denizens of Gordita Beach like so:

Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and the leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight...

Palms beating together, louvered light, a downpour — ingredients sufficient on their own for me to love a book. ( )