Three of Thomas Pynchon’s novels – The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Inherent Vice (2009) – are set primarily in California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. These “California novels” are shorter and less structurally complex than the longer, encyclopedic, globe-trotting, and quasi-historical works that have established his literary reputation (though The Crying of Lot 49 is undoubtedly the most widely read and taught of his novels). Two of the longer novels, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Against the Day (2006), also conclude with episodes set in Southern California, in the 1970s and 1920s respectively. Despite their formal differences, the California novels deal with many of the same concerns that animate the longer works, including perhaps most centrally, the struggles of individual human subjects to understand and liberate themselves from the varied but often obscured agents of determinacy – economic, political, psychological, and existential – arrayed against them. In order to situate the California fiction within the body of Pynchon’s work, it is worth exploring some of the meanings attached to the common setting that Pynchon chose for them.