Was going to give the book two stars simply because the work is so often feted as post modern and important.

The best thing I can say about this novel is that it’s good that a novel like this can be written. That said, I have no idea why anyone would bother to write such a book.

The story meanders, engages in a phantasmagoric deluge of gnostic associations, and generates confusion, bewilderment, and disgust in the reader.

Then there’s the sexual obsession, the coprophagia(lookitup), the pedophilia, and the incest.

You know that very brief moment after you wake up in the morning? That moment when you're not sleeping but you're not yet awake. You kind of know what's going but you're not fully aware. You're in conciousness limbo. When you read Gravity's Rainbow you fall into this conciousness limbo. You read the words on the page but they don't all make sense. You're confused, you don't know what's going on but... you love it. You're floating through this syntactical Pandora's Box fully unaware of your surroundings, not wanting to stop reading so you just read and read this 900-page page tome never wanting to stop. And then it ends. And you want to start again. Because you know that this is the greatest novel ever written. And you'll never read anything like it ever again.

One of the things that most irritates me is the idea that someone would read books like this purely in order to show off or impress people. I see comments like that all the time, have had them directed at me, things like: you didn’t actually enjoy it; you only wanted to make yourself seem intelligent. Wha? Who exactly would it impress? Some faceless dude on the internet? Well, gee. Or will some super hot girl on a train make lingering eye contact with me over the top-edge of my copy of Ulysses? One can but hope. Thing is, does anyone actually give a shit about the difficulty of what other people are reading, y’know, out in the real world? From the often hostile reaction readers like me get on forums and message boards you’d think that you could walk into a nightclub wearing a 'I’ve read Proust' t-shirt and be mobbed. It simply doesn’t happen.

Of course, when choosing to read any book, the themes, the plot [or content] have to appeal to me in some way, but, assuming that is the case, that I have two novels to choose from both of which appeal to me, and one is straightforward and one is not, why would I pick the difficult novel? The simple fact of the matter is that I like, I genuinely enjoy, being challenged, being stretched. As the 'serious reader' in my circle of friends and acquaintances I’m often invited to borrow best-selling books – detective novels mostly, or thrillers – and I always politely decline, not because I’m judging anyone, merely because I know that I don’t get off on that kind of thing. I need to be made to think. Recently I went on holiday and I took with me a hefty collection of Anton Chekhov’s short stories and Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White. I don’t do beach reads. In a way, I wish I did. I’d probably be a lot more at ease in myself. Anyway, it was for this reason – this desire to be challenged, to be made to work – that I took up Gravity’s Rainbow [GR].

To some extent GR’s reputation as unreadable or alienating is overstated. I mean, it’s only a book, and they’re just words, yo. If you can read, then you can read GR, only it might require a little bit more patience than your regular kind of novel, and you might have to accept that not every reference, not every paragraph in fact, will make sense, will be familiar, or recognisable. I think a lot of the time when the term unreadable is thrown around by people it simply means: I hated it. Which is fine. I hate a whole shit-tonne of things. But I think it’s unfair to try and turn others off reading something purely because you didn’t like or enjoy it. However, it would be remiss of me not to mention some of the stuff that traditionally turns people away from GR:

There is some science
And maths
And psychology
There are a bunch of acronyms, some of which are never explained
There is a huge cast of characters, and you won’t keep them all straight in your mind
There are extreme flights of fancy, that drop in on the reader without warning and appear to have no connection to what the author was writing about at the time

More so than the obscure references, the science, etc, I feel as though the real impediment to enlightenment, vis-a-vis GR, is Pynchon’s style, his syntax in particular. This is especially true of the first 200 or so pages, which are by far the most challenging. I must admit that the way the man puts together a sentence, his grammar and his word-order, is weird, is sometimes baffling. The style reminded me a lot of Faulkner, actually, especially Absalom Absalom. Like with that book there are some sentences here that appear to be random words strung together in no particular order; the words themselves aren’t obscure, they simply don’t naturally follow each other. Another thing that the two books have in common is what I call selective grammar. What I mean by that is that for a page or two the grammar seems conventionally correct, so obviously the author knows his business, and then one will suddenly come across a large chunk of text that appears to be missing the necessary commas, full-stops etc. Occasionally distracting or even tedious that might be, but it is not especially tough to navigate. Perhaps the most irritating thing for me, about GR and the style, was the way the story would shift perspective from one character to another without warning, almost in the middle of a sentence. And it would sometimes take a paragraph or two to realise that it had happened. That feeling of catching up with the book, of sometimes being one step behind, instead of riding along with it, was frustrating.

After the first two hundred plus pages the book becomes so so so much easier to read; if Part 1 is like being caught outside in a storm without an umbrella, then entering Part 2 is like stepping through your front door out of the rain; suddenly everything is clearer, more comfortable. There is *gasp* some straightforward plotting, but, more importantly, the writing is cleaner, more accessible. It is as one luxuriates in Part 2’s ease that one might start to wonder why Part 1 is the way that it is. With the marked difference between the two parts it is almost as though Pynchon wants to disorientate you, only to lead you toward enlightenment. It’s a kind of literary tough-love. In a lot of novels it is the main character who moves from psychological confusion to clarity, in GR it is the reader. But that, of course, still doesn’t explain why. One could say that as Part 1 is set mostly in war-torn London the disorientation is appropriate; most of the numerous characters are living in circumstances in which bombs are dropping all around them and at any moment one could take them out. The characters who don’t appear to be as concerned about death are at least professionally or psychologically under extreme duress. The war, in all its mind-fuckery, its horror, is being brought to bear on everyone in Part 1. In effect, then, your confusion, your disorientation, mirrors theirs and vice versa. Likewise, the world of Part 1 is in a state of disintegration, of collapse, and the characters are attempting to impose order on this chaos, just as you, the reader, are trying to impose order on the chaos of the text.

A lot is made of the book’s flat characters; it is the one of the chief criticisms of GR in particular, and the author’s work in general. By flat what these dissenting voices mean is that the characters are under-developed, simple, one-dimensional. They don’t, they say, feel like real people. We never, they continue, get to know them. Two things strike me as interesting about the flat characters accusation. Firstly, where are these novels which have characters in them that feel like real people? The critic Michael Hoffmann once wrote of Ebenezer Le Page that it is one of the few books that gives you the full man. I’ve always found that absurd. No book can actually give you a full man. As far as I am concerned, all characters in all novels are flat if what you want are real people.

I feel as though what readers are actually wanting from characters in books, when flat is thrown around as a criticism, are people who have a detailed back story and who subsequently grow or change or learn lessons and behave in ways that make sense to them, the reader. Don Quixote is flat, they’d say, because he does the same things over and over again. GR’s Slothrop is flat because we are told very little about his life and his feelings, beyond his paranoia, confusion and fear of death. My response to that is: yeah and so what? This is the second point of interest for me: why are some readers so put off by what they see as flat characters? Why is flat wielded as something with which to strike down a book or writer? Maybe it’s just me, but I like different things; I am able to appreciate a book that tells me, in detail, a bunch of stuff about a character’s mental life, but I am also equally able to enjoy a cornucopia of characters who merely serve the author’s themes or ideas. Books aren’t real life, the characters in them are not real people, so why do we insist that they must strive to be so? Search me.

Another fallacy when discussing Pynchon’s fiction is to label it cold and unemotional. I genuinely don’t get that. Of course, it is wrong on a literal level, because his work is obviously full of emotions such as fear and paranoia etc, but even if you put those aside, as I don’t think they are the kind of emotions people are missing in Pynchon’s work, I’d still say it’s a bad call. I’d say that Pynchon is one of the most sentimental and compassionate authors I have read. In fact, I think he takes it too far on occasions and his stuff can become mawkish. Take Jessica and Roger, who are two vulnerable and confused people who are unsure whether they are genuinely in love or whether they merely need each other in the appalling circumstances of war. All of their interactions are shot-through with longing and tension and doubt. Consider, also, the justly lauded dodo killing scene; the clumsy, not-made-to-endure dodos are clearly a stand-in for man, particularly those in war situations, civilians and soldiers. There is an atmosphere of pathos throughout almost the entirety of GR.

So, I hope I have gone some way to at least debating, if not refuting, some of the popular criticisms of Pynchon’s work. I also hope I have maybe gone some way to convincing those of you who have been previously put off by its reputation that it is possible to read Gravity’s Rainbow, that it isn’t nearly as intimidating as some would like you to believe. However, you may at this point be thinking: all that is fine and all, but you gave the fucker three stars.Yes, yes, I did. [I even *whisper it* considered giving it two stars.] So, what gives? Well, I think it is possible, and necessary, to defend the book - or any book - against petty or wrong-headed criticism, but it does not, of course, follow that you are therefore obliged to have fun reading it. Cards on the table? GR bored me quite a bit. I kinda felt as though Pynchon had made his point in the first 300 pages and, as the novel progressed, was starting to repeat himself, was starting to get on my nerves; I felt as though if I gave up I wouldn’t be missing anything, and that’s perhaps, like with a relationship, the point at which you know you ought to part ways. In all honesty, I just don’t think Pynchon and I are a good fit, because although I like the idea of his books I hardly ever love them, in the reading. In fact, the only one I have genuinely loved is Mason & Dixon. That’s a great book. But the rest of his stuff? Meh.

Not much to say that hasn’t been written already. And by much better writers than I. This is a novel that is so much incredible and astonishing the second or third time. Genius on all levels.

Pynchon has tied me in knots. I have many interposing opinions about his book. All of them are entirely predictable. In fact, sonny-Jim, I worry that this indelible sense of confusion is exactly how They want me to feel... I fear They’ve had me integrated through to the limit of delta-t. Yes, that might just be the problem: I’ve been spread temporally across the zone. Spagettied from one boundary to the other. I’ve been recast into a new polymetrically moulded synthiform of Impolex-G and my tarot readings indicate signs of readiness to join the White Visitation. Am I in line to see all the way down to the 00000? But, no. Come, wake. All is well. Look, kiddo, let’s get this review on track. You’re going off on another of your silly retrograde journeys. At last: something real.

Now —

Let’s start again with those knots. What I mean by that is this is a book which is not only deliberately confusing in both themes and plot, but also one on which I’ll struggle to maintain one single unchanging concrete opinion. For one thing, Pynchon has second-guessed a lot of the criticisms a reader like myself might have and found clever ways of dismissing them in his text. The truth is that a lot of the time reading this book is an absolute pain in the arse. It’s almost certainly the hipsteriest, wankiest, dick-swingiest book ever written and whenever I went to pick it up I felt the urge to adorn myself in my finest denim and AeroPress myself a single-origin espresso. But, hey! My inner hipster needs nourishing from time to time lest he gets antsy, and there’s definitely a time and a place for books as misguided and ambitious as this one.

First and foremost, the defining characteristic of Pynchon is that he is intelligent. Scarily intelligent. And he’s a writer who wears his cleverness on his sleeve. Being bright is (fairly obviously) a prerequisite to being a great writer. I simply don’t believe you could write a great book without being extremely lucid and well-read. However, cleverness isn’t the be-all and end-all. It isn’t the only thing that makes a great poet great. Perspective matters more than innate aptitude. My concerns with Pynchon are that, sometimes, it feels as though his books are exercises in nothing but cleverness — laboratories for ingenious designs and showy techniques, but ultimately not things which are going to move many people.

I’d be surprised if there is a living author with more natural talent than Pynchon. His mind is like a turbocharged 6.5L V12 compared to most authors’ 2.0L flat-4. Indeed, his trouble might be that he actually has too much talent — an engine too powerful for its chassis and tyres, so his stories end up spinning off the side of the race track, sliding around in the fields of literary self-consciousness at the expense of keeping grounded and telling an honest tale. Pynchon’s novelistic world isn’t real. It doesn’t replicate anything close to real life.

When I set out reading this book (a long time ago now), these were the general thoughts which were swirling through my rapidly spent head. However, sooner or later, I realised I was picturing the book all wrong in my mind’s eye. I was trying to imagine a book with scenes which looked like those of a serious war film. Scenes like this:




However, after about 150 pages, it began to dawn on me that that wasn’t the book Pynchon had ever intended for me to read. He was actually being much more whimsical and playful than I’d first realised. Once I began to visualise his writing with an aesthetic more along these lines…




…I started having a lot more fun. And, just like an episode of Archer, it doesn’t matter all that much whether you miss a few plot details, or if certain details don’t quite match other details. Pynchon, at his core, wants his book to be fun. Gravity’s Rainbow is a romp through his overactive mind: more Grand Budapest Hotel than Dunkirk. It has a comic, cartoonish quality, which is at once one of its assets, but also, I think, its slight downfall. The potential for basically anything to happen at any moment, and for the book’s complexities to reveal any whacky conspiracy it likes is its defining artistic achievement. It’s a book that revels in the murky depths of the systems through which we must all navigate, and which seeks to imitate the creeping paranoia of living in our muddled, conspiracy theory-laden modern world; however, a book which separates itself as far away from realism as this one does is always going to be in danger of becoming a meaningless melee. Sometimes it’s hard to care about any given plot development because there’s always a sense that at any moment Pynchon might just decide to change his mind and write in some new and unsuspected whacky-ism which then moves the story off in whichever nonsensical direction he’d like.

However, regardless of my own tastes, this is one of only a few books I’ve read which can compare to James Joyce in terms of technical inspiration. Both Joyce and Pynchon seem to be so far ahead of the rest of literature that there’s always a sense they’re jokingly dancing away disrespectfully on top of it, making a mockery of its earnestness and struggling to take its conceits with any seriousness — as though sceptical of its sincerity. The thing is, though, where Ulysses is only a showpiece of cleverness on its surface but a book with real heart and soul and humanity at its core, Gravity’s Rainbow will always struggle to really mean all that much to me, despite its virtuosity, which is why I could never give it the full five stars.

At 902 pages, Gravity’s Rainbow is certainly no walk in the park. However when you plug in headphones and listen to the ambient soundscapes of Robert Rich’s Trances/Drones album, you’ll likely be reading one hundred pages a day. Shit, that’s what reading is all about isn’t it? In this case, it’s getting stuck into a sprawling, dense, comical, self-aware, psychedelic, terrifying, mind-numbing novel of precognition, phallic rocketry, parabola and paranoia. This is why there is literature: to read novels like this. Gravity’s Rainbow is quite simply an experience.

n  “A screaming comes across the sky…”n Set in the phantasmagoric landscape of Europe during the final stages of World War II, amidst a huge cast of characters and subplots, we follow the adventures of Tyrone Slothrop, an American soldier who seems to have a hidden talent that involves erections and rockets. Part of the novel’s difficulty stems from the constant digressions, distractions and subplots dominating the story. These subplots share interconnecting themes consistent with the Slothropian satire. There’s a Russian intelligence officer, whose mission might involve more than what the KGB is interested in, Roger Mexico’s investigations into the rocket bombings in London, a Dutch spy, stoners, a psychotic Major, a killer octopus, an experimental parapsychological facility named ‘The White Visitation’, Pavlovian conditioning, a German officer who manages the A4 rocket project… This list could go on for pages… seriously, it’s that vast.

n  “I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in The World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever- though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power… We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests...”n

Gravity’s Rainbow seems to express an anti-authoritarian, seemingly anarchistic stance, in a paranoid world of distractions, false identities, conspiracy theories, espionage and comic action. Shadow government, the Syndicate, the Elite, the Establishment or whatever you want to call it are ominously portrayed as They, Them or Those in scenes. Nobody feels in total control of themselves throughout the novel, whether philosophically, politically or sexually. They seem predestined to be slaves of the System. It’s a lifelong Masonic plot undertaken since the days of the Founding Fathers. While the novel is a satire and a farce in many moments, this is as dark and terrifying as it gets. This can happen in the middle of a sentence and you feel it. It’s a powerful feeling, which almost makes you feel the need to look over your shoulder from time to time. It’s quite overwhelming.

So Gravity’s Rainbow seems to be speaking of a world devoid of individuality and free-will. Pynchon’s Slothrop seems to be a man vaguely aware of his own futility, amidst his comical adventures. This unknown force or control is over his shoulders throughout the novel. In a conversation with Katje, Enzian states:

n  “You are meant to survive… You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be… I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to know. That’s why your story is the saddest of them all.”n

After all, who is in real control of himself? Other characters laugh off the possibility of their free-will, shades of Schopenhauer, due to their consciousness of other things and their experiences in space, time and causality. Political control seems to be an illusion to Pynchon, or perhaps Pynchon, straight outta the counterculture, is jumping on the bandwagon of philosophical anarchism. There seem to be characters plucked right out of the late sixties and dropped into Pynchon’s Zone: Hippies, stoners, dopers and counterculture anarchists pop in and out of the novel and distract the reader with drug-induced conversations, senseless chatter on classical music, drugs and paranoia. A deliberate anachronism on behalf of the author? World War II might be Pynchon’s Vietnam War, a war he reportedly was against from an American standpoint. Or perhaps he is satirising the whole counterculture movement that this novel seems so much a part of. The Byron the Bulb story, as bizarre and surreal as it is, is far from a distraction however, as it is a powerful parable on our individual nature and release from political power.

And so what is the ultimate high? The Rocket of course. The Rocket is a call to God, a rise from the crumbling Earth to the heights of the heavenly kingdom. With the help of Impolex G, a fictional plastic that can become scientifically erect, there is a secret Rocket project that may or may not be a parable for escaping the Samsāra of our modern day existence. It’s the Rocket project that can take you to the places where the white stars hang. Go ahead, achieve that n  "pure, informationless state of signal zero."n However, Gravity is always present and the Rocket will be under the influence of Gravity. Life is a parabola…

n  "We don't have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart."n

This book is hard to really talk about because I bet I would get something different from it every time I read it. This time around, what stuck out to me the most were the relationship between Roger and Jessica, the candy tasting with Darlene and Mrs. Quoad, the Pavlovian Pudding guy, Katje/Slothrop, and other things that would be spoilers.

I think what I loved the most is how Pynchon is able to describe things - they end up beautiful and terrifying at the same time. War and sex are all of the sudden the same. I remember the moment it occured to me what the title was referring to - I still get a little shiver.

A few of the quotations I marked:

"But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words - believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away." (how Roger felt about Jessica)

"You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible...."

"Whatever it is with her, he's catching it. Out in the ruins he sees darkness now at the edges of all the broken shapes, showing from behind them."

ETA: Review after second reading in 2015

When I last read this book in 2008, I knew I wasn't catching everything. I zeroed in on the relationship between Roger and Jessica because it connected the most to where I was that year and kind of blissfully ignored the rest. Even though R&J are more like bookends in this massive novel about many many things.

I pledged that the next time I read it, I would only do so with A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel and maybe a group of people. This was selected for one of my book clubs and a few people actually made it to the end, but with a little less actual discussion than I would have liked.

That is partly a fault of the book. You could read it looking for many things - commentary on war, control, identity; the layers of mythology and Kabbalah and tarot; symbols and pop culture references. It's all there. I got more of it by looking at the companion but I'm not sure that added as much as just getting to read it again did.

Truth be told I was feeling more smug about finishing it last time, and this time just wanted to get it over with. I probably should have read a hundred books about war before coming back to this one - I still haven't read Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five, although I did read the Pulitzer Prize winner during my reading of this (same war, completely different story.)

Because that is what the novel was about to me this time around. I felt like all the commentary on mythology did was in service of the overarching god of WAR. How it controls us, how the people making the decisions aren't the people suffering the consequences of them, what it does to families and relationships, and how massive weapons of annihilation can end up seeming more like an equation, a button, a blueprint.

So I'll leave you with this:
“So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is death.”

This novel: pure dynamite. The many stops and starts preceding my reviewing this thing were probably to be expected, after experiencing much the same in my reading of it, over some four months of feelings both extreme and paradoxical: annoyed incomprehension and delight, mad disgust and awe, blessed amusement and horror, etc., until settling into a kind of sad comforted confusion by the novel's quasi-end.
.
A work of impossibly mind-numbing yet -invigorating complexity, sinking to murky moral depths but also surfacing then soaring to awesome philosophical heights, Pynchon's monsterpiece boasts a hella impressive multiplicity of ideas, themes, and forms (moving beyond the novel to include film, comic-book, theatre, musical, even mathematical formulae: in a great postmodern pastiche), which nevertheless somehow crystallises into a singular brilliance, as of a rocket's flare, exploding to amazing if discombobulatory effect. All this demands a lot, i.e., patience, humility, sheer stubbornness, even in the face of the most impenetrable passages, because their more accessible if not epiphanous counterparts lie ahead, often just around the corner: waiting like pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

"Gravity's Rainbow," like the V2/A4 rocket central to the novel and its many, many moving parts, defies conventional plot summary, yet here's my (pitiful) attempt anyway. Divided into four parts, the book roughly follows paranoid American Tyrone Slothrop during 1944 as he finds himself in the middle of serious and fast-developing shenanigans after various governments and organisations (whether British, German, Soviet) discovered the weird correlative if not causative link with rockets exploding all over Europe in places coinciding with Slothrop's sexcapedes. Now that's greatly simplifying this book, being the main thrust of a story with such smorgasbordic imagination it has things as bonkers as Pavlovian octopi, sentient pinballs, immortal light-bulbs (also sentient), superheroes, witches, seances, etc., but somehow makes them all hang together, in some tableau of beautiful chaos.

But what I enjoyed most about "Gravity's Rainbow," even when I didn’t Get It, are those frequent reassurances Pynchon plants throughout the book: that it’s Totally Okay not to understand some or all of it, that there too can be grace and humility in the not-knowing, the not-understanding. Paranoia is Slothrop’s defining characteristic, and also “Europe’s Original Sin—the latest name for that is Modern Analysis.” “Nobody,” Pynchon however cautions, “ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.” While there’s irony in my masochistic disregard of this very good advice and nevertheless ceaselessly annotating his book to hell and back, the margins scribbled over with desperate arrows and symbols, it’s no small relief to find these occasional little kindnesses, these meta-pats on the back.

One has to admire the magnificent blend of erudition and ambition, which produced this masterwork. I have no idea why 400 characters were necessary to tell this enigmatic tale -- publishers, a scorecard, upon reprint, would help even diligent readers keep track. One suspects that passages of drafts were composed by a not altogether sober mind, although the edited drafts show discipline. However, there are places where all semblance of taste is altogether forsaken, not sure why, unless the forces of anti-gravity were simply just too overpowering. We live under a death sentence, true enough, as we all know -- the silent rocket may strike us randomly at any time. Randomly, that is, unless you're Tyrone Slothrup. With his track record it should have been harder for him to get a date. Didn't find many, or even any, lady characters who weren't predictably drawn as simple objects of desire. I think Pynchon aspired to be an American James Joyce in this novel. The writing is brilliant in many passages but Mason & Dixon transported where this novel did not, nor did V. Saul Bellow's audience once was estimated to be in the range of 20,000. Pynchon's audience is narrower -- truth be told, I fear, the audience which really understood this work is 0001. At this point Pynchon seemed to write for himself whatever he damn well pleased. Perhaps, he has earned this distinction by virtue of the merits of his extraordinary work. Perhaps, he wants to lift us beyond the realm of gravity to a higher place. But the reality of the situation is that this epic literary work is burdened by the artifice so eager to transcend the gravity to which it is so tragically bound.

My second time going through this book and this time I get what all the fuss is about. Nothing else is quite like it. A brilliant military satire and much much more. Almost a musical with all the songs punctuated throughout. Looney tunes and genius at the same time. Challenging until you find your footing, but can anyone really claim to have totally gotten their balance in this warped world.

It took me the better part of seven months, going 10 to 20 pages at a clip and excluding all other novel-reading, but I have finished. And while I'm proud of my focus and tenacity, I'm not entirely sure it was worth it.
I'm not going to bash something that obviously means a lot to so many people. It just didn't mean much to me.
I have long contended that genius isn't just having a brilliant thought, but communicating that thought to others. If this work conveyed some amazingly deep meaning to you, then great. Pynchon is a genius. It simply didn't speak that way to me. I recognized several moments of really insightful writing, but they were buried too deeply in meandering subplots and obtuse characters I couldn't keep track of. I don't care if a book doesn't have a plot, but it needs to have a point.
The novel is a remarkable achievement and a one-of-a-kind literary benchmark. It's just not my cup of postmodern tea. I'm happy to be done with it so I can put it back up on the shelf and get back to actually enjoying my evening reading instead of just getting through it.

I dallied with the idea of writing a very short review, saying pithy things like:

"I'm glad that's over."

or:

"Fuck."

OR should I go more eloquent: "I'm going to set this day as an anniversary to commemorate why I'll never read this book again."

But I think I'll just state that I think I just got post-moderned in the ass.


Or I could say some wonderful things about the novel, too, of which there are many, many wonderful things, such a great and funny commentary on WAR, Operant Conditioning, Drug Fiends, Erections, Scatophagy, Porn, Dirty Limericks, Porn, the Physics of rocketry and drug making, Porn, Orgasmo, Porn, and a great scene near the beginning that brought to mind Pink Floyd's The Wall movie with the buttcheeks over London mixed with a sampling of the BLOB and Bananas.

Do you think this was an easy book to read? You might think so with all the Porn. But no. It's a drug-trip with funny scenes that's very smart and it goes way beyond my tolerance level for being smug. Maybe all this 60's and 70's thing about making sure every penis and vagina is getting it on to shock the straights just isn't for me. I'd like a little story with my porn. Fortunately, there's a lot of story hidden right beneath the surface, here. It might be hiding right beneath all the SS or a few more Nazis or just behind that other Nazi, or is it behind this one?

Golly, it's kinda hard to find it. I know it's there. But at least there's yet another erection and girls everywhere are flocking to this inexplicable sex symbol... but wait! Yeah... I have to admit the nasal erection bit was funny as hell.

*sigh*

I've read better bricks. I've even had better bricks slam across my head.

Alas, this one was not a solid gold brick with a slice of lemon wrapped around it, but it *might* be just as crazy. (Thank you, Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster. I need you so bad right now.)