Let others work themselves into high dudgeon if they want. Not me. I had more fun reading “Inherent Vice” than I’ve had reading a Thomas Pynchon novel since I read “V.” in 1963 and “The Crying of Lot 49” three years later.

If, at the age of 72, America’s most reclusive writer and one of its most revered novelists wants to edge his merry way into the Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald/ James Ellroy business with a wildly comic variant of L. A. Noir, private eye and all, I’m going to be the last one to hector him for abandoning the mammoth historical meditations of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (one of the most hosannaed and studied novels of the past half-century) and his last book “Against the Day.” Let others rain on his parade. I’d rather pick up a glockenspiel and march in it.

Here we have between covers a very real creature that might have been thought as mythical as the Sphinx or the Hippogriff — an authentic Thomas Pynchon beach novel, compulsively readable and veritably begging for some intrepid soul to talk Pynchon into letting him film it.

Lest anyone think “Inherent Vice” isn’t deeply Pynchonesque from its opening sentence (“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to”), you’ll be immediately disabused of that notion by going back to his amazing first novel “V.,” whose protagonist Benny Profane “schlemiel and human yo-yo” is clearly an East Coast forerunner of “Inherent Vice’s” Doc Sportello. Pynchon’s new protagonist is a short, 1970 hippie and private eye who lives near “Gordita” (read Manhattan) beach in L. A. (shades of Jim Rockford and Harry Orwell), has long hair, smokes every joint he can lay lips on and has no trouble doing a few lines of coke, too, just to be sociable.

In fact, sometimes when Doc is keeping company with a friend named Denis, their weedhead badinage has the flavor of a Cheech and Chong routine. (In truth, it seems to me a lot funnier. This book made me guffaw — often.)

Time and place are very specific here. The Manson murders (i. e. the Tate-LaBianca killings) are still fresh on everyone’s mind and about to go to trial; Agnew is still Nixon’s alliterative veep; and a huge cache of counterfeit $20 bills with Nixon’s picture on them is delightfully absurd but not nearly as ridiculous as it would become just a few years later. The Internet is struggling mightily to be born. Las Vegas is just starting to replace mobsters with Howard Hughes and his Mormons, so that America’s Sin City of the desert can become a theme park.

However much Pynchon — like the Coen Brothers in “The Big Lebowski” — is taking from the kind of novels that have been written by Chandler or Macdonald or their flamboyant (and sometimes Pynchonesque) heir James Ellroy, the game plan here isn’t terribly different from “V.” 46 years ago.

You’ve got the lovably grungy stumblebum world of Doc Sportello, full of surfers, ex-girlfriends in bikini bottoms and Country Joe and the Fish Sweatshirts, psychedelic surf bands called The Boards, and a cop nicknamed Bigfoot, who seems to have once had an admirably minor movie career.

And then you’ve got the marrow-chilling encroachment of something called The Golden Fang, which starts out as the name of a schooner, turns into an Oriental drug cartel and then a lavish California behavioral modification emporium begun by a bunch of dentists (charter members of Pynchon’s readership will have fond memories of Dr. Eigenvalue’s “psychdontics” in “V.”).

Let us cede now that Pynchon’s richly inventive and vehemently esoteric paranoia is as ripe for nostalgia as anything else (and more convincingly so than most). At the same time, in a post-9/11 world, Pynchon’s fear of conspiracy and awe at comic malevolence seem stunningly reasonable in the 21st century.

Remember that Pynchon’s apparently malevolent fantasies have had a way of turning into realities just a few years down the line. Those of us who read “The Crying of Lot 49” in 1966 thought the idea of Tristero, his huge fictional alternative mail system, a joyfully whacked-out invention by one of our more rollicking literary geniuses.

In 2009, “Inherent Vice” was delivered to our office by UPS, just an hour or so after the daily FedEx and DHL mail arrived (while the once all-powerful U. S. Postal Service keeps frantically raising first-class stamp prices to survive).

Our story here, then, begins with Doc Sportello’s old flame Shasta, who wants Doc to nose around and find out what happened to her new boyfriend, a billionaire Angeleno real-estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann, who travels with a Praetorian guard of Aryan Brotherhood types (the most prominent of whom has a near-swooning idolatry of Ethel Merman).

Mickey disappears in a daylight raid on a massage parlor, one of his bodyguards is killed and Doc himself is somehow knocked unconscious. He is therefore close enough to be implicated like any good Philip Marlowe or Jim Rockford of yore but, as much of a weedhead as he is, the cops still like him because when he isn’t getting stoned, he’s good at what he does (actually, he’s good at it even when he is stoned).

In Pynchon-land, the scruffier and more dubious you are on the straight-meter, the more lovable and more decent you’re liable to turn out to be. And the higher your tax bracket and the more expensive your car and the more official your job, the more likely it is you’re in league with God only knows what and for Lord knows what reason.

And while all this is going on, it seems entirely logical to have passing references, say, to the lost continent of Limuria, which as we all know (?) is the Pacific Ocean version of the lost continent of Atlantis.

From its street geography to its pop cultural faultlines, books don’t get more L. A. than “Inherent Vice,” which is vastly more entertaining in parody than Pynchon has been for many books now.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that history and its macro-world don’t always overhang ominously indeed on Doc and all his scruffy, sophomoric schlemiel friends.

There is a lot of music referred to on the fly in “Inherent Vice” (Pynchon, bless him, once wrote the liner notes to a set collecting the best of Spike Jones).

As Giaocchino Rossini knew in a series of piano pieces he wrote in his ’60s and ’70s, one of the more common “sins of old age” is a reawakened playful spirit and the desire to have fun.

Bravo.

Jeff Simon is The News’ Arts and Books Editor.

Inherent Vice

By Thomas Pynchon

The Penguin Press 369 pages, $27.95