Reading this book gave me a serious urge to watch The Big Lebowski again. 
 Larry 'Doc' Sportello is a private investigator in LA in 1969, and he's also a damn dirty hippie who smokes dope constantly. Doc gets a visit from his old girlfriend Shasta who has been seeing married and wealthy Mickey Wolfman. Wolfman's wife and her boyfriend want Shasta to help them with a scam to get Mickey committed to an asylum, but Shasta feels guilty and wants Doc to help Mickey out. 
 Doc no sooner gets started than he gets blamed for a murder by his arch enemy LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen who has nothing but contempt for hippies. Mickey and Shasta have vanished, and while Doc tries to wrap his foggy brains around these developments, he's also approached by another woman who claims that her boyfriend, a saxophone player in a surf band that supposedly died of an overdose, is still alive. 
 The Crying of Lot 49 is the only other Pynchon I've read, and this one has the same kind of hazy vast conspiracy lurking in the background . And like that one, I was left kind of liking the book in a general sort of way while thinking that Pynchon is just fucking with me on some level. There's a lot going on in here in terms of information and secrets with a friend of Doc's feeding him info he's getting from the first primitive form of the Internet. 
 The spacey and affable Doc makes for a unique main character to guide us through a noirish but laid back landscape, but it was Bigfoot Bjornsen with his constant stream of anti-hippie comments that I found the most enjoyable. 'Cause much like Bigfoot and Eric Cartman, I am also a hippie hater. 
 I get why Pynchon is worshipped as such a post-modern master, but there's just something about his style that isn't engaging me at the gut level.