Branding a Thomas Pynchon novel as “light reading” seems almost as far-fetched as one of the author’s hallucinatory plotlines involving time travel or a dog that reads Henry James.
Yet his latest offering, “Inherent Vice,” a noir-like novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s, is being billed as his most accessible novel to date. Landing three years after his 1,085-page epic “Against the Day,” the 384-page book has been labeled a “novella” by literary bloggers. The Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles is handling film rights . None of Mr. Pynchon’s previous complex, postmodern novels have been adapted to the screen.