California used to mean something. Not just Arnold Schwarzenegger and the epicenter of pornography; nor Kobe and Shaq and the occasional backdraft of Beat era memorabilia. California was where things happened that simply couldn't happen elsewhere in America because here, as Joan Didion put it, "beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

Based on what little we know of his life, Thomas Pynchon probably has spent some time in California. He's written two books about it: "The Crying of Lot 49," his manic satire of a revenge story; and "Vineland," the most political novel to come out of the 1980s.

In his zany new novel, "Inherent Vice," he returns to the Golden State, tunneling back to the early 1970s to paint a nostalgic portrait of a fictional beach town when the counterculture finally lost the battle to the forces of control and governmental power.

Larry "Doc" Sportello, the diminutive, pony-tailed PI who narrates this novel, tumbles through its story in a doper's haze. There is hardly a scene in which he is not puffing, toking or jonesing for a joint. But he does, amid the fog of skunky smoke, have a moral center. So when his ex-girlfriend comes to him with word that her current lover is about to get whacked, Doc decides to investigate. He pulls one thread and 200 others unravel to reveal the messy weave of 1970s Los Angeles beach life.

Pynchon has always been -- how to put this -- a bit of a naturalist when it comes to plotting a story. Anything and everything goes in. And so novels like "Against the Day," his 1,200-page zeppelin of a novel, keep readers scrabbling after them, chasing their shadows.

"Inherent Vice" is no different. To keep it all in your head, you'll need to remember the identity of biker gang members, hookers, bent cops, straight cops, shady developers, gamblers, motorheads, gay Vietnam War veterans, new age gurus, Doc's doper friends and the edgier beach punk bands they all worship.

There's a messy, untidy muchness to this universe that is about to be wiped out. The people in power don't want dopers and vets and Mexicans living on top of each other on the beach. They want to create steadily rising home values and vacuum-packed suburban happiness. Family values.

Or maybe that's just Doc's paranoia kicking in. With all the dope they're smoking, everything and anything seems like a possible conspiracy. This book is full of this sort of hippie logic. "Remember how they outlawed acid soon as they found out it was a channel to something they didn't want us to see?" says one character, messing around on the computer in the bowels of the early Internet.

"Inherent Vice" would seem like a cartoon of those times, were it not all so true. Indeed, southern California has become a developer's paradise. Orange County is one of the most conservative parts of the United States. It's impossible to tune in, turn on and drop out, because even on the beach -- which is now as polluted as ever -- people are plugged in to the mainframe. Amusingly, wistfully, "Inherent Vice" reminds us it wasn't always so.

John Freeman is acting editor of Granta and author of "The Tyranny of E-mail," forthcoming from Scribner.