Critics reacted well to Inherent Vice, particularly for its mainstream appeal. In a generally favorable review, The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani called it "Pynchon Lite", describing it as "a simple shaggy-dog detective story that pits likable dopers against the Los Angeles Police Department and its 'countersubversive' agents, a novel in which paranoia is less a political or metaphysical state than a byproduct of smoking too much weed".[1] A review by academic Louis Menand in The New Yorker declared the novel "a generally lighthearted affair", while adding that there were still "a few familiar apocalyptic touches, and a suggestion that countercultural California is a lost continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of co-optation and repression".[2] In a scathing review in New York magazine, Sam Anderson wrote that "with no suspense and nothing at stake, Pynchon's manic energy just feels like aimless invention".[3]