as "fairly pointless" and remained unimpressed by its "grab bag of themes". Inherent Vice Inherent Vice was published in August 2009. A synopsis and brief extract from the novel, along with the novel's title, Inherent Vice, and dust jacket image, were printed in Penguin Press' Summer 2009 catalogue. The book was advertised by the publisher as "part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a cannabis haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." A promotional video for the novel was released by Penguin Books on August 4, 2009, with the character voiceover narrated by the author himself. A 2014 film adaptation of the same name was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Bleeding Edge Bleeding Edge takes place in Manhattan's Silicon Alley during "the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11." The novel was published on September 17, 2013, to positive reviews. Style Poet L. E. Sissman wrote from The New Yorker: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy." Pynchon's style is commonly classified as postmodernist. Themes Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, paranoia and conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "high" and "low" culture has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing. In particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll. The character McClintic Sphere in V. is a fictional composite of jazz musicians such as