"Inherent Vice"

I've never been much of a fan of crime novels, and I'm still trying to figure out if Inherent Vice was actually a crime novel. Certainly there was crime, and a resolution to that crime engineered by a protagonist private investigator, but what connected those events and made them palpable and mysterious to a reader--hence, the crime novel tag--was more bumbling than it was intriguing narrative. In fact, the one area the book did succeed in was replicating a writing style that perfectly matched the late 60's hippie era it was set it. The dust jacket was right--Pynchon was in an unfamiliar genre; he should stick with the epic post-modernism.