Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, 369 pages

From America's greatest living novelist comes the story of Doc, a private investigator - of sorts - in the Southern California of 1969, who becomes involved in a tangled set of schemes and plots drawing together missing real estate developers, possibly undead surf musicians, frozen-banana-loving crooked cops, seductive masseuses, and mysterious ships from the Bermuda Triangle (or close enough), all adrift in an ocean of drugs the size of the Pacific.

Indeed, there are so many drugs that the excess quickly tips over into parody.  There's also quite a bit of carefree sex, and some rock and roll, if you can dig it.  If nothing else, Inherent Vice is certainly a vibrant trip through a weird, wild, colorful world, and even if it is more Vineland than Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon remains the poet laureate of the postmodern age of narcissism and paranoia.