This might be my favorite novel. I read it over the course of around three months, on my fourth attempt, when I was living in Tallinn, Estonia. Something about residence in a very small European country heightens one's sense of the absurd. I would bring it to lunch at the bars where I dined and start crying into my club sandwich when the book was sad and laughing into my kebabs when it was funny (which is nearly always) and there are a lot of bartenders who probably thought I was crazy.

The first rule of Gravity's Rainbow is you do not talk about Gravity's Rainbow. Just read it and don't worry about all the things you don't get. You could spend the rest of your life in graduate school of various sorts and not be as smart as Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, so don't sweat it.

There are swaths of this book that I definitely don't get. Pointsman, the psychologist? Didn't get it. Tchitcherine? Didn't get him, as a character, didn't understand why he did what he did, almost ever. But hidden inside all the dross is literature of unparalleled terror and beauty: the chapter in the very middle of the book about Pokler and his daughter, which left me literally bawling in public, the only time I can think of I've ever done that. Oddly, the description of U-boat latrines. The dejected Slothrop wandering Germany in a pig suit. Pirate Prentice's romance. The overgrown adenoid that invades London. The dogs grown intelligent. The sad allusions to Webern's death. The notorious scat sequence that people get all worked up over. The Proverbs for Paranoids interspersed throughout ("You will not touch the Master, but you may tickle his creatures..."). Blicero's carnival of torture, better than anything Gonzalez could devise, and more honest, too.

Gravity's Rainbow is a quick guide to all the ways you could have lived your life but did not; all the injustices you have not had to face; all the ridiculous theories of the afterlife you can't bear to accept. It teaches you how to read itself. It's been copied relentlessly, by Trainspotting and Kurt Cobain and reading it means there's a certain voice that will inhabit your brain forever. It's like going on Samhain vacation from reality with nothing but a crate of bananas and a load of S&M. Caveat emptor.

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.

Gravity's Rainbow is a rocket launched into the zenith of the literary sky…
Gravity's Rainbow is picaresque, enigmatic, obscene and labyrinthine. It is all things postmodern tumbled in the huge motley heap.
They say that amongst the more than four hundred of characters in the novel there is no protagonist. Well, there is a protagonist: it is the ominous SG-00000 rocket – an epicenter of evil, a mysterious artifact Tyrone Slothrop is looking for, but it hides from us until the end of the book.

…after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural…

In this cosmic way, the Earth gets fertilized to be pregnant with the future…

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences.

History is a canvas painted by lunatics…

Selections From My Mental Commentary Upon Reading Gravity's Rainbow

Difficult my ass, I know who Werner Van Braun is.......... What a fantastic name........ Errrrr...............Maybe I need to reed that again......... Third time's a charm!.......... Shit........... Okay, who/what/when/where/why/how the fuck is going on?............... Okay, I think I get what's going on here........... Never mind.............. This whole thing is absolute rubbish............... Did Dane Cook's boner write that paragraph?................. That was awesome, I have no fucking clue what Pynchon's talking about, but he baffles me in a really elegant way....................... Alright, this is out of Dane Cooke's league, I think Lou Reed's boner wrote that section.................. Obama should appoint Pynchon the "naming things and people czar"............... This whole thing is absolutely fucking awesome................. I never want to read this part ever again............. I'm going to have to immediately reread this part........... That's not even supposed to mean anything............ Finished, onto Section 2!................ u.s.w.

Over the past few years, I've tackled several supposedly difficult novels with relative ease. As soon as I encountered the Erededy waits for pot section, I devoured Infinite Jest like a bored housewife reading Sweedish torture porn. Blood Meridian may have been a struggle to get through, but only because McCarthy's prose is so dense with a kind of a savage beauty that I was fatigued after reading three pages. War and Peace didn't justify it's difficulty to me at all, unless you measure difficulty by page length. I don't want to come off as narcissistic about my cognition, but if you think I'm guilty, I would understand you. (Get it?)

And then I encountered Gravity's Rainbow* There are some websites out there who belittle the difficulty of this book. They do this to speaking directly to first time readers. I guess that's admirable, I can certainly understand the proclivity to hype up and push something you love, but it's also inaccurate. For a GR virgin, a good portion of the novel is destined to be simply befuddling. I mean, for fucks sake, a major portion of the book is about rocket science. GR is a perfect storm of difficulty: Pynchon doesn't help his reader out with the plot; the narrative weaves between time, place, central character, and/or voice with little or no warning; Pynchon throws out a plethora of references to science, history, pop culture, scatological jokes, Norse mythology, etc that you would need several PHDs in a multitude of different areas of concentration to fully grasp; the prose, while often heartbreaking or hilarious or mind-blowing is not exactly accessible and often frustrating.

Out of any other novel I've read, GR most demands a second read. I actually bought the companion book, but I found that it was not particularly helpful. It provided minutia when I would have been fine if they had just explained what it meant relating to what was happening with the narrative and it neglected some things I had question about. Also, it made for an extremely clunky and disjointed reading experience. Eventually, I found a website that had quick summaries for each episode with particular emphasis on callbacks to previous events. I read these after the corresponding episode and found it to be of great use. But I tossed the Instapaper link, so good luck with Google.

My final rating reflects a compromise of some sort. A couple hundred pages into the book I wasn't enjoying myself. The only thing that kept me from quitting was the hours put in and the understanding that if I didn't finish it then, I probably would never come back to it. I soon started getting in the flow of things, and started seeing what all the fuss is about. That's the thing about Pynchon. You'll read one section and think that people sanctify this book as a form of intellectual swagger. And then the next section will completely connect with you and leave you thinking that this is the best book of the 20th century. I certainly noticed that my reaction to the reading experience was subject to my mental state. That's true of all books, but with GR it's almost like before you start reading you should do transcendental meditation, or go to a yoga class, or snort several lines of cocaine to truly prepare yourself. You have to surrender yourself over to the text, or you're going to realize that you've been reading for the past thirty minutes and you have not understood a single thing.

The four star rating is far from conclusive. Even during the last 100 pages I wavered somewhere between 3 and 5 stars. The goodreads star system completely fails the first encounter with Gravity's Rainbow. I give it a @.^ out of 10.0. Maybe a Ω-. I just know I'm really glad it's finally out of my to read soon pile. Now the problem is I kinda can't wait to read it again.




* I bought GR years ago, and had picked it up a few times since then only to shelve it. Over the past couple years, since I've started reading serious fiction again, I've had GR on my 'to read soon pile,' and I've had a few false starts, only to put the book aside after a dozen pages with a resolution to read when I had spare time.

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.

Between 1945 and 1959, the United States JIOA & CIC conducted an intelligence program named “Operation Paperclip”, in which an excess of 1600 surrendered German scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought over to the Western mainland for government employment. The primary purpose of this operation was to advance the US’s position in both the Soviet-American Cold War and Space Race. These German STEM workers found themselves dispersed amongst various branches of government and commercial industry across the US, bringing with them their years of experience researching, developing, and deploying German weapons, most notably the V2 rocket. This expertise, fostered during their years in the Rakentenstaat, was crucial to the development of the Americans’ own avionic weapons, not least of all the X-20 Dyna-Soar.

Stay with me.

One of the most notable companies to employ swathes of these reformed German scientists was a little aviation company named Boeing. The work done by those hired at Boeing during the Paperclip Era was to further develop the X-20 (among other devastating weapons and vehicles), based partly on the technology that only these German minds had insight into. Which leads me to my point – who was working at Boeing in the late-50's to early-60’s as a technical writer? I think at this point it should be pretty obvious.

This is where my impromptu historical lesson transitions gracelessly into conjecture. I cannot speak for the man, only offer hypotheses. I suspect that Pynchon was terrified by what he saw going on behind the shuttered windows of Boeing. I don’t believe the public knows (or will know) everything that was experimented with and on during those years, but I would happily bet my copy of GR that it was not all related to simple commercial flight. I think his singular brand of paranoia skyrocketed in response to the work he found himself unwittingly implicated in. With no other outlet besides writing to process such existential dread, the author worked on two novels in alleged simultaneity. And thus, we’ve found ourselves the grateful recipients of two responsive works: The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow.

While the Norman Mailers and James Jones of the era aimed to distil the horrors of war with transparency and cold integrity to history as it unfolded, another literary camp emerged. Enter, the satirists, the comics, the Joseph Hellers and Kurt Vonneguts. These writers felt dissatisfied with realism as a sufficient medium to convey the terror of facing annihilation on a daily basis. Thus, a new brand of black comedy and absurdist historical retellings found its way into the cultural consciousness. When the day-to-day reality of war vacillates somewhere between surreal and absurd, it stands to reason that a satirical take would actually be fitting to capture the moment. Pynchon positioned himself as one of the leading authorities on this literary approach, producing a momentous work that defies any easy summary.

Go ahead, try – tell me what Gravity’s Rainbow is about, in fifty words or less. Now you see what I’ve spent the last 500-odd words doing little more than tread analytic water. I too, am struggling to distil the novel down to the digestible soundbite and amateur Goodreads “review”. Where does one even begin? Well, I suppose you could start it like this:

It starts with a desk.

A desk in an ordinary government office, plainly organised with algorithmic precision; fibreboard sectional walls with no rooves, every corner a perfect Pythagorean ninety degrees. On this desk is a haphazard assortment of junk. Throat lozenges, jigsaw pieces, ukulele strings, News of the World… It’s a complete mess impinging on the precision of its surroundings. And that pristine office sits stoically in a crumbling city, pockmarked with rocket fire from a projectile which annihilates its target before they even hear its approach. Chaos amidst order, order amidst chaos. This moment, 18 pages deep, is the firing pin of the explosive narrative that’s about to ruin your month.

Gravity’s Rainbow is an audience-hating compendium of polarity. Every action that occurs is equalled only by its opposite, as Newton, Keynes, Moses, and Farina wrestle for ascendancy amidst the rubble. Do you think I’m joking? Look closer:

The projectile’s zenith marks an equilibrium between its rise & fall; Prederites converge together to counter the dominant Elect; the bell rings & the dog salivates; anthropological exposure emerges at that same rate that history suffers erasure. It’s everywhere, you can’t escape it, Pynchon thought it through. If you’re willing to endure his histrionics, you’ll see it for yourself.

I would love to cognitively unburden myself with the belief that GR is simply the bi-product of the author’s drug use; An illicit pharmaceutical panoply crossing the blood-brain barrier of a genius recluse armed with a typewriter & all the time in the world.

I wish it were that easy…

…but it never is with Pynchon. That's why readers continue to flock to him, as one generation rolls into the next. He left all the pieces on Slothrop’s desk on page 18, intent on letting you know that there’s meaning to be mined within the madness… but only if you're willing to dive in with the understanding that no matter how hard you try, you'll still lose. Every object on that desk recurs with stark intentionality - this is not an accident. While literary entropy is the dominant force governing the pages of The Zone, that’s not to say that this is all just “weird and wacky” for its own sake. This is intentional. Why does entropy and absurdity matter; what’s the point he’s trying to make?

Imagine spending years of your life ambling between your day-to-day obligations, burdened with the knowledge that at any moment you may disappear entirely off the face of this Earth before you even hear a noise. You’ve seen it happen before. You’ve watched buildings crumble and friends evaporate under the impact of the V2’s wrath. As far as the Poisson distribution is concerned, your number will be called sooner or later.

What do you reckon that would do to your psychology? I can’t speak for you, but I know my mind would bend under the weight of that knowledge. I’d likely watch my own psyche fracture and fragment as the Rocket blew apart more and more features of the world I once considered familiar. It stands to reason that given enough time under these conditions, the absurdity of my reality would likely become conditioned to my new norm, and horrifically fantastic occurrences would no longer seem out of place. Perhaps a Toilet Ship, a sentient Octopus, or chatty Lightbulb aren’t that strange after all. I don’t know about you, but I think the author’s terror was entirely justified.

Pynchon is smarter than you. He hates you. He's out for your blood. You can try your hardest to control the variables, but in the end, entropy always wins.

My head hurts. I love it.

"The first star hangs between his feet.
Now---"

That quote from GR gives me endless shivers to this day, and if you resonate with the book, you will feel the same. It is indeed the climax of the entire book, and it's not a spoiler quoting it here. (It can't be spoiled in any conventional sense: you will see.)

I've read GR twice now. It's fabulously difficult and worth every bit of the effort! Permanently changed the way I think, like no other book ever has. It will rewire your brain to become more powerful at analysis and synthesis, therefore increasing your linguistic cognitive ability, all marks of human intelligence. My sincerest and highest possible recommendation.

Will I read it a third time? Seems likely. After that I expect it will become an eternal part of my lifelong growth and education--one that's altered my way of thought--like very few other books have. It's probably in that position already.

(For a short topical review of the novel, check out this other Goodreads review: Gravity's Rainbow. I couldn't do it better.)

A hose of prose -- relentless, uncompromising, uber-detailed, purposefully disorienting, godlike, puerile, silly, song-filled, wonky, wise, sexy, stupefying, audacious, ambitious to the point of OCD ADHD ickiness -- hooked to a thick rectangular pulp-based nozzle interface intended to excoriate at full-blast the reader's face off forever. "Central" thematic conflict is fate v. free will -- Pavlovian-type behaviorism v. something more than reaction to stimuli, in this case, arousal in advance of the rocket -- but there's also the conflict between the featureless blastulablob, ie, the semi-formless multi-tentacled octopus emitting streams of inky language, versus the perfect form of the arcing parabola of a rocket, of ejaculate, of one's life span, of life bursting out and transcending for a bit in a gorgeous arc while death's all around. At best, the thematic parabola pokes its gleaming porpoise curve out as it rides swift currents in a very unsettled Shark of Confusion–infested sea of A+ language. At worst, A+ language never freakin' stops screaming across the page, rarely slows, never settles, shifts in content but rarely in wholesale form -- leaving a reader to grasp for the life-raft of association among all the many apparently disconnected bits. So much sexiness sometimes comes off like it's studded throughout to string the reader along. Dozens of dog-earred pages (quotes to come) but no real LOLs. In general, I read 450+ pages carefully and then had to read more quickly after that since my time wasn't being rewarded as it had been especially after page 50 or so. That is, I wasn't into it / engaged / immersed / making many connections / appreciating the prose anymore. Once the rocket/orgasm conceit kicks in around pg 50, the book leaves its blast-off cloud of dust behind and ascends, then hangs in the Zone, then descends . . . I failed the descent section, essentially. Skimmed until I hit the end reading more or less as fast as I could. Sorry, T. Ruggles. I liked this one more than V. (which I quit on 200 pages in), less than Lot 49 (which I've read twice) . . . Worth it maybe to study it one day, but I don't have the patience or inclination these days. Some of the highest prosey peaks ever (philosophical expository jags and top-notch "keenly observed" descriptions of the natural world worth seven stars at least are maybe what make this the unfakeable canonical biggie that it is instead of just an artifact of late-'60s artistic self-indulgence/excess?), but its default flow seemed a bit too slow throughout, despite (because of?) top flight fanciful prose on every page. Goes to show that the towering literary artistry rainbow can't quite manage transcendence sustained over several hundreds of pages without a little more of the old fashioned flying buttress-like requirements of basic readerly orientation and sustained narrative interest (ie, sustained characters, something more of a sustained plot). For those wondering if it's worth the time it takes to read, I'd say, yes, sure, definitely, at least to be familiar with the first 200+ pages. It's more of an infinite book than Infinite Jest in that there's apparently so much more going on, so many asides, offshoots, wormholes, whatnot, plus I can always go back and more closely read the final 300 pages. Wholly unique. Reminded me of "Ulysses," "The Recognitions," and "Don Quixote" (might finish the second half of it this summer), especially when parodying film genres. Now to read a string of much shorter novels and story collections! Sakes alive! Bring on a Tobias Wolff father-son hunting story!

“I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow



I personally enjoyed Against the Day more, liked Mason & Dixon better, but think Gravity's Rainbow is the more important. Pynchon definitely belongs on the shelf next to Joyce, Kafka, etc.. There are only a handful of modern writers who belong near him... Roth, McCarthy, DeLillo, DFW (perhaps). Anyway, I started the book in 1993 and stopped after just a couple episodes. I loved it, but wasn't nearly ready. I wasn't close to being prepared. Finished it today. "Tree arising! O pure ascendance!"

Antes de emprender el viaje, es necesario pertrecharse. Se trata de un largo camino en el que te encontrarás con incontables obstáculos: múltiples personajes, continuas referencias a términos sobre ingeniería, matemáticas, química; saltos temporales constantes y cambios de escenario repentinos, casi en el mismo párrafo; una narración deslavazada, que no sabes por dónde te va a llevar; extrañas y brillantes metáforas. Pero también son de agradecer los paisajes que podrás apreciar durante el viaje: bellas y líricas descripciones, personajes atractivos de nombre carismático, erudición enciclopédica, visiones salidas de una potente imaginación, humor extravagante.

Con Pynchon no valen las medias tintas, exige el cien por cien de tu atención. La determinación es esencial, sobre todo en los pasajes más aburridos, que los hay. Una vez mentalizado de lo que te vas a encontrar durante este largo peregrinaje, empiezas a leer, emocionado pero también algo atemorizado por las dimensiones de la obra y por el autor, siempre impredecible. Pero sabes que merecerá la pena el esfuerzo.

La primera parte te reafirma en lo que ya pensabas: el libro va a ser un hueso duro de roer. Se trata de una novela excesiva en todos los sentidos. Un planteamiento en el que Pynchon te da a conocer docenas de personajes, la gran mayoría para no volver a aparecer más, pero a los que sin embargo intenta darles voz. Las escenas y argumentos crecen sin parar, ramificándose salvajemente. Terminas desorientado, ya que Pynchon no se para a explicar demasiado lo que está sucediendo. Pero bueno, es la seña de identidad de los autores posmodernos, plantear situaciones que no tendrán solución. Pynchon te da a conocer el escenario: Londres, 1944, acabando la segunda guerra mundial, con las bombas volantes V-2 cayendo desde el cielo. Conoces al que parece será el protagonista de la novela, Tyrone Slothrop, militar americano que trabaja en inteligencia y que tiene la capacidad de predecir cuándo caerá uno de estos artefactos del cielo porque se lo avisa una erección, todo ello producto de un experimento de un alemán demente, Jamf. Pero Pynchon no abunda en más explicaciones. Aun así, tienes paciencia porque hay suficientes páginas por delante para entrar en detalles. Parece que la idea es hacerse con las diversas piezas de un enorme rompecabezas, sin tener un plan claro de cómo van a encajar. Hasta aparece una sección sobre estudios paranormales aplicados al espionaje donde es posible comunicarse con los muertos. Pynchon recurre al uso de cancioncillas humorísticas y paródicas, un recurso marca de la casa. Sexo, mucho sexo y pornografía y escatología tienen su lugar en la trama, en algunas escenas realmente desagradables y obscenas. Y es que Pynchon no tiene freno, no le importa tocar temas que provoquen rechazo. Él va por libre y utiliza todos los recursos a su alcance.

Empiezas a entender el porqué de la polémica que rodea a esta novela, tanto las cosas malas que dicen sobre ella, como las buenas. Te viene a la cabeza el artículo ‘Las posibilidades perdidas de la ciencia-ficción’, de Jonathan Lethem, que se publicó en The Village Voice, en el que analiza lo que podría haber significado para la ciencia ficción el que ‘El arco iris de gravedad’ hubiese ganado el Premio Nebula de 1973, al que estaba nominado: "En 1973, El arco iris de gravedad de Thomas Pynchon recibió el Premio Nebula, el mayor galardón otorgado en el campo antes conocido como "ciencia-ficción" (un término que prácticamente ha caído en el olvido)..." ( ‘The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’)

En la segunda parte de la novela es cuando empieza a ser reconocible el Pynchon que más te gusta, el de  ‘V.’ y  ‘La subasta del lote 49’. Parece que tenías razón respecto a Slothrop, ya que éste empieza a tener más preponderancia en la historia. Entras en un escenario donde predomina el juego de máscaras y los cambios de identidad, y donde Slothrop es el blanco de todo tipo de estrategias. No es raro por tanto que S. caiga en un estado de paranoia permanente. Te introduces en un tramo donde resalta el paradigma posmoderno. Slothrop es producto de visiones y de manía persecutoria; el delirio es constante, así como la utilización y acumulación de siglas; parece que exista un enorme ente que lo controla todo; Guerra=Capitalismo. El humor está muy presente, con una serie de persecuciones dignas del mejor cine mudo. Empiezas a entender mucho más a los personajes y cómo están definidos.

Y entras en la tercera parte. Y no puedes evitar exclamar a viva voz: "¡Qué cabrón!" A lo largo de quinientas páginas, Pynchon te adentra en la Zona, en su particular visión de la Guerra y la Devastación. Te presenta, en un absoluto frenesí, un mundo dominado por descripciones de pesadilla, hiperrealistas, barrocas y bizarras, donde tienen lugar todo tipo de personajes, aparte de los ya conocidos: estafadores, traficantes, degenerados, enanos, es difícil distinguir la realidad del panorama mítico que Pynchon te propone. Parece que todo empieza a cobrar sentido. El rompecabezas del principio toma forma de espiral, de molécula con múltiples brazos, donde todo se dirige hacia un núcleo pero donde no es necesario que todas las ramificaciones tengan un final y una explicación, porque están ahí como parte del Juego, para darle sentido al Todo que es la novela. Slothrop tiene su misión personal, encontrar una explicación a su pasado, y saber qué sucede con el Cohete. Los personajes que se cruzan en su camino también tienen su propia historia: Squalidozzi, Enzian, Tchitcherin, Pökler, Greta. Así como algunos de los lugares que Pynchon te va presentando: Mittelwerke y sus túneles, Berlín o el Sudoeste de África. Todo ello te recuerda la imagen de la conspiración por antonomasia, esos tableros que aparecen en las películas de conspiraciones, esos donde un montón de hilos están atados a chinchetas que conectan entre sí cientos de fotos.

Ese afán por los saltos constantes entre tramas y cuestiones, la inmersión en los temas históricos y enciclopédicos, el sexo como arma, ese ir más allá en los géneros y estilos, convierten la lectura de ‘El arco iris de la gravedad’ en todo un reto. Pynchon parece que es como una religión. Has de tener fe y creer que te va a llevar a buen puerto. O eres creyente, o no lo eres.

Update after 3 years

"Pillar of Priapus" Award, 1975 for
Gratuitously Vile Scenes of Highly Perverted Sex

Priapus sculpture, Boston Museum of Fine Art

Am I unenlightened to find a Nat'l Book Award winner so repulsive?

The 1973 National Book Award winner was voted to win the 1974 Pulitzer, but the committee decided it was too offensive to win the award, or something like that. Before reading this, I thought that the Pulitzer committee must have been making a statement about moral decline and "free love” or was otherwise being a collective prude.

Now, I think WTF? The story was all over the place, but mostly repugnant by any set of morals of which I know. I have never considered myself simple, prudish or on a moral high horse, but if I earn any such description in being offended by gratuitous and repeated references to brutal rape of children by multiple men simultaneously, father-daughter incest on multiple occasions over several years beginning when the girl was 11, and by something that made me actually heave, which, to make my point I must describe, but will say this as nicely as possible: an S&M sequence in which a man was tied up and the woman defecated into his mouth and made him swallow, a scene so gross even the author acknowledged that the man had to have shots for the e coli bacteria after each such occasion.

And yet, I don't think I'm simple or a prude. I've appreciated the literary quality of books revolving around statutory rape (Lolita) and sibling incest (Ada, or Ardor). I can handle a lot. But I cannot get past the abominations listed, to appreciate, enjoy or find literary redemption in this novel. This does not mean that I ignore the reality that such things occur in this evil world. What I mean is, where do we draw the line? For me, it is at acts (albeit fictional) that make me physically sick and that civilized societies of this world—who draw criminal lines all over the map on other moral wrongs—are pretty much united in condemning and outlawing with severe and stringent punitive measures, such as sex with pre-pubescent children (and visual depictions of sex with children), and sex between parents and their children.