Review of Gravity's Rainbow

Brilliant, Frustrating, Falls Short of Greatness, and not for the Faint of Heart



I don't usually use images in my reviews. But this review screamed for one.

Several caveats for anyone attempting to read this.

1. You most likely won't get through it on your first attempt. I didn't.

2. Reading this is a project! The book is nearly 800 pages, and pretty convoluted. It's like reading Joyce's "Ulysses" (although I think "Ulysses" is the better book). You need to allocate more time and attention than you'll need for the average book. I found the combination of audiobook and Kindle book useful. For a book like "Gravity's Rainbow", the audio helped me get through it, but it wasn't sufficient. I frequently followed along in the Kindle version.

You'll also need some reference material. I used the Gravity's Rainbow Wiki...not the Wikipedia one, but this site, which has info on all things Thomas Pynchon: http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.c...
This wasn't particularly satisfactory as a resource, but it was better than nothing. There are some books available, such as Steven Weisenburger's "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion", but my library didn't have this, so I settled for the Wiki.

The Wiki had some information, but it was extremely difficult to navigate, and lots of references were missing. For example, towards the end of the book, there was a guy named Zhlubb. I know enough Yiddish to know this is an unattractive, boorish, or dumb person, but the Wiki didn't even mention it.

Worse, you have to dig to find anything. The page-by-page reference guide left a lot of stuff out.

There was a page of German translations, but more than half the German words used weren't there, and I had to search for them.

3. You most likely won't understand a lot of the obscure references, even if you research them while you read. If you research every single word you don't know, you'll never finish the book.

There are multiple references to European and American history and popular culture. There's lots of information about various mystical traditions.

Also there are words in multiple languages---German, Herero (an African language), French, Spanish, and Russian, among others.

Pynchon also loves neologisms. Obviously, you won't find these made up words in any reference material. That throws even more confusion into the mix.

So don't get too bogged down in knowing everything. Just concentrate on getting through the book.

4. This may be the kind of book, that like "Ulysses", needs multiple readings. (However, unlike with "Ulysses", I may not have the patience or the desire to read it again).

5. This book is definitely NOT for the faint hearted or easily offended. It's filled with cheerfully obscene language (and lots of it), violence (although not nearly as much as other books), ethnic jokes, scatalogical jokes, petty criminals and generally amoral characters, drinking, drugging---including smoking marijuana, taking amphetamines and psychomimetics (LSD didn't exist yet), shooting heroine and snorting and shooting cocaine. (I did wonder how much of the endless drug taking was historically accurate or if Pynchon was imposing the 60s drug culture on a World War II background. Maybe it doesn't matter, since this is basically Pynchon's hallucinatory fantasy set in a World War II and postwar background. But--the book does seem to be historically accurate in other respects, so maybe the drug scene is too.).

There is also grossness of every kind (example: in one very funny dinner scene, some characters are making up disgusting alliterative food names such as "Vomit Vichyssoise". The scene is quite humorous if you take it in the right spirit, although a lot of it's admittedly the kind of stuff children would laugh at, so it's both irritating and comical.).

Plus there is loads and loads of exuberant sex. Many of the characters are totally amoral and will do it with (just about anything) that moves. There are graphic descriptions of just about any kind of sex imaginable: anal, oral, heterosexual, homosexual, transvestite, sadomasochism, necrophilia, sex with young people, sex with old people, etc. There is also lots of pedophilia (and sex with children). That seems to be Pynchon's particular favorite. It's not surprising that Nabokov was Pynchon's writing teacher in college. And Pynchon has few filters, so he writes whatever comes into his mind without inhibition. No wonder he avoids public appearances. Can you imagine him being interviewed on CNN?

In one humorous scene (I think Pynchon makes fun of himself a lot), Slothrop, the main character, feels lust towards a pig. Fortunately, bestiality seems to be the only place where Pynchon draws the line. Slothrop does NOT have sex with the pig.

6. This is not easy reading by a long shot. The already confusing plot with multiple characters and historical/literary references is made even more confusing by the fact that in many cases one or more characters may or may not be the same person. Example: we find out that Blicero is the same as Weissmann, but are Ilse and Bianca (two little girls) the same person? Is Katje also Margherita? Famous film director Gustav von Goll adopts the alias Der Springer when he becomes a big time postwar black marketer. In many cases, as in the world of a psychotic, it's unclear whether two characters are actually different people or aspects of the same person.

One website describes Pynchon as "bat shit insane". I think that's entirely possible. It's also possible that he was "under the influence" of some intoxicant the entire time he was writing this.

So---you may very well ask---why did I even bother to read this book and even give it four stars?

I read the book because I read The Crying of Lot 49 many years ago and became a Pynchon fan of sorts.

In fact, I would recommend that you read a shorter Pynchon book, like "The Crying of Lot 49" first before tackling "Gravity's Rainbow", to see if you can even stand reading Pynchon. His hallucinatory writing style is not everyone's cup of tea, to put it mildly.



public-domain.zorger.com

Ok. Now, I'll attempt to give you a "summary", which is laughably impossible for a work as meandering and cryptic as this.

The book is largely (on a surface level) about World War II German rockets: their design and creation, the rocket launches, etc. I think the title is meant to describe a rocket (although that's one of many things in the book that isn't entirely clear). Pynchon calls the rocket the "World's Biggest Phallus" or something along those lines. That type of humorous sexual symbolism is very Pynchonesque. Pynchon is also quite a geek. There are lots of very technical discussions of rocket engineering and other scientific topics. I admit that even though I'm a geek myself I didn't always completely understand the technical stuff. Of course, Pynchon's tendency towards make believe (even in technical matters), makes it even more confusing. I have found, though, that most of his scientific and technical discussions are based in fact. It's just that he inserts a made up term here and there just to have some fun.

Most of the action of the novel takes place in Europe, although there are glimpses of Africa and America as well.

The novel begins in London towards the end of World War II (1944 I think).

We are introduced to several minor characters in the beginning---"Pirate" Prentice, Osbie Feel, and Teddy Bloat (don't you love the names?) They might all live in the same house (this, like much else in this novel, is unclear). Prentice is famous for cooking with bananas, which he grows in a hothouse on his roof. All of these guys are shadowy characters, whose roles in the war are unclear. (I've read some speculation that Osbie Feel might be Pynchon himself, but I wonder if Slothrop--see below--might be Pynchon).

Our "hero" (well, not really a hero at all but the main character) is Tyrone Slothrop, an American soldier from Massachusetts stationed in London. Slothrop is a real head case. This is understandable, since, apparently a shadowy "They" (the government? academia?) have been doing clandestine psychological and psychosexual experiments on him since he was a baby. Also, his father was always trying to kill him, and his mother was an alcoholic. We see him working in an office with his British buddy Tantivy, making maps of locations the German bombs are hitting. Apparently these locations coincide with the residences of the many London girls Slothrop's slept with. He's quite the ladies' man and apparently, too, the "kiss of death" (although he's not aware that he is). It seems that a German rocket lands wherever he's had sex (and in Slothrop's case, that's a lot of places).

Anyway, Slothrop ends up in the "White Visitation", a former mental hospital that's been converted to a facility for wartime psychological research. There is a so-called "PSI Unit" there that includes a bunch of people with unusual talents, like clairvoyants, psychometrists, mediums, etc. There are also some more traditional scientists, including Pavlovian Dr. Pointsman, who does experiments on dogs and other animals (including an Octopus named Grigoriy) and Roger Mexico, a young statistician, who's mapping the frequency of the German bombings based on statistical distributions.

Mexico has a love affair with Jessica Swanlake, who's in some arm of the British military (ATS?) even though she's already affianced to another man, Jeremy "The Beaver". He sees Jessica fixing her bicycle on the roadside and offers her a ride (which is how they meet cute).

Anyway, at the "White Visitation" the sinister staff are doing more experiments on Slothrop. Notably, they are administering truth serum and interviewing him on subjects like racial tension in the U.S.

BTW, Pynchon uses the color white a lot throughout the book to symbolize death (as it does in many cultures). He uses the color black (paradoxically) in the same way. Black leader Enzian is considering suicide.

Slothrop, as a result of his "contributions" at the White Visitation is allowed to go on leave (in Southern France I think). He meets Dutch blonde bombshell Katje at a casino there. Katje has escaped from the evil sadomasochistic German Blicero who is in charge of a German rocket installation in Holland. Blicero turns out to be--or may be--Major Weissmann, whose commentaries and notebooks figure importantly in the book. (Pynchon loves puzzles, and stories within stories within stories). Blicero casts Katje and Gottfried (they look alike) as Hansel and Gretel in his bizarre sexual fantasies which they act out. Katje is, again, one of those people with a shadowy past and present. Is she a spy? A double agent?

Slothrop has an affair with Katje (he has an affair with nearly every attractive female he meets, actually). One day, his room is robbed and everything (his clothes and papers) are gone.

He escapes and somehow gets new clothes and fake papers. He then goes AWOL. Since he's effectively lost his American identity, he can never return home.

The rest of the book follows Slothrop as he drifts aimlessly through "The Zone" (which is what post-War Europe is called). Like everyone else, he is forced to survive on petty crime.

There are endless characters and subplots, some more important than others.

One subplot involves Slothrop's meeting with Geli Tripping (great name again!) a pretty young witch who is in love with Russian officer Tchitcherine. Slothrop sleeps with Geli, of course. She then sets out to search for her missing lover Tchitcherine.

Another subplot introduces us to Leni who is unhappily married to Franz Pokler, a German rocket engineer. She finally leaves him, with their child, Ilse. Both Leni and Ilse apparently end up in the camps, as Leni is a communist (and may be part Jewish? unclear).

In still another subplot, Slothrop, dressed in a Rocketman costume, is kidnapped by Argentinians (aided by Tchitcherine) while he is delivering a huge shipment of hashish. The kidnappers stick him in a stolen German U-Boat. Here he meets Margherita Erdmann (Greta) with whom he has an ardent affair. Greta likes to be whipped. She is looking for her lost daughter, Bianca. Both Slothrop and Margherita end up on the Anubis (a ship named for the Egyptian god of the dead). There are orgies on board the Anubis. Margherita's husband is also on board the Anubis.

Still another secondary character is Thanatz, obviously named after Thanatos, the Greek god of the dead.

A different subplot involves the African Herero tribe and their leader Enzian. A group of them are living in Germany as the Schwartzcommando, a group of black Africans fighting for the Nazis.

Another minor subplot introduces Takeshi and Ichizo, two manic Japanese kamikaze pilots.

In one of many "stories within the story" we hear the tale of an immortal light bulb---yes, a light bulb!!--named Byron. (Is this a humorous reference to the British romantic poet?)

Slothrop eventually ends up back in Berlin. Berlin (and all of post-war Europe) has become a stewpot of decadence. People live in the streets and inhabit burn out buildings and abandoned houses. Prostitution, drugging of all types, all forms of sexual decadence, and petty crime (drug dealing, black marketeering, etc.) have become the norm. This is not surprising, as it's now the only way to survive. His friends there are the very aged (but spry) dope dealer Saure and lovelies Trudi and Magda. He also briefly lives with Margherita.

There are numerous other subplots and endless characters. As I said, in many cases two or more characters may be the same person and it's often difficult to tell.

It's like living inside a schizophrenic's nightmares. It also sometimes felt like this novel was written in a psychotic's secret inner language that the reader couldn't possibly understand.

But--it's kind of fun to read.

Large sections of the novel are just hilarious.

There's a scene where Slothrop drops a mouth harp down a toilet (in Boston or New York) and dives in to retrieve it. It's described in nightmarish detail and hilarious magic realism.

The book is filled with endless songs and poems (some hidden, some not), many quite humorous.

Example:

"My Doper's Cadenza" sung by Bodine, an American service man.

There's an abundance of funny scenes (although much of the humor is gallows humor, toilet humor, or sexual humor).

Example: Elderly Berliner Saure wants to know why Americans say "Ass backwards", when, he points out, asses are always backwards. Shouldn't they be saying "ass forwards"?

Another example: Dr. Pointsman (then Roger's boss) is trying to capture a stray dog for his experiments. Roger and Pointsman are at a bombed-out house in or around London. Pointsman gets his foot stuck in a porcelain toilet bowl, and cannot extricate himself. He is forced to limp around with the toilet bowl clamped to his foot while the dog escapes.

In another weirdly funny scene, a giant adenoid digests a London neighborhood.

Just about everyone loses their loved ones, either because love falls apart or so many people die in the war and its aftermath.

In fact, the precariousness of their existence probably accounts for a lot of the decadent behavior. These are people living with the possibility of death all the time. No wonder they drink, drug, and sex themselves into oblivion.

The main subject of the novel actually seems to be death in its many varieties and the destructiveness of war. To Pynchon, I think, even sex and excrement are metaphors for death.

Pynchon's political insight is almost prescient. He maintains (possibly correctly) that there really were no "sides" in World War II, but that there was actually collaboration between the so-called "enemies". The real Fascist rulers are corporations and greed, which know no boundaries. We can easily see that multi-national corporations run the world today. So it seems, Pynchon called that one correctly.

Also, Pynchon's Allies are committing atrocities nearly as bad as those done by the Germans. Many of the experiments done at The White Visitation are pretty awful.

In Pynchon's postwar world, no one seems to have much allegiance to their country or to the Axis or Allies anymore anyway. People colloborate across boundaries for profit and survival.

Also, the fighting has supposedly ended in the postwar "Zone". But we find out that's not true.

I didn't give this 5 stars, because I think it falls short of being a great book.

Ulysses was also faulted for "obscenity" although by comparison to Pynchon, Joyce seems like Mother Theresa. Joyce also loved to use obscure literary and historical references. He also loved popular culture.

But there the similarity ends.

"Ulysses" is a much greater book than "Gravity's Rainbow" because Leopold Bloom, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus somehow resonate with us. They are "everyman" and "everywoman" (although they are, of course, very specific characters). The point is, we connect with them as humans. Bloom is a kind and lonely man. I also thought "Ulysses" was a far more coherent book than "Gravity's Rainbow". "Gravity's Rainbow" is a bit of a shaggy dog story, although the ending does (sort of) wrap things up--if not nicely, at least in a way that kind of makes sense.

In "Gravity's Rainbow" there is much less of that feeling of identifying with the characters. We do feel for Slothrop and even like him. He's probably the closest thing to an "everyman" character in the book. Like many others, he is a product of his times. His mind has been warped by all the psycho-experiments done on him (often without his knowledge or consent). But, the amorality, crime, decadence, insanity, and the hallucinatory quality of the entire novel somehow keep us from admiring or identifying with most of the main characters. Blicero is clearly evil. Dr. Pointsman is also villainous. Most of the others are unreliable and untrustworthy. Only Enzian, the black Herero leader, comes across as a decent human being. The others would all "sell their grandmothers up the river for a dime".

Still, "Gravity's Rainbow" is a cautionary tale about the violence of war and its aftermath. Death is its main subject, as I already mentioned. Pynchon seems uncertain of the possibility of life after death, although he does seem to lean towards it. Seances contact the deceased. Even statistician Roger Mexico starts to admit that the PSI researchers may be on to something. So it seems that Pynchon is rejecting the purely logical and materialistic approach to this question.

George Guidall does a brilliant reading of "Gravity's Rainbow". I haven't always liked his audio work in the past, but he does an amazing rendition of this very difficult reading material. He's great at singing the many Pynchonesque tunes, too.

Now everybody -

How to start with Gravity's Rainbow? Well, it's tempting to start by calling it a comedy. It just might be the funniest book I've ever read (only Cat's Cradle can really challenge that claim), and it's also a gigantic, dark, uproariously funny joke at the expense of the entire literary institution. I mean, you thought Ulysses was irreverent? This is the step beyond Ulysses, this is Ulysses where seduction scenes are interrupted by octopus attacks, a man throws pies at a plane, soldiers who might actually be the paranoid delusions of our boy Slothrop sing limericks about Germans who have sex with rockets, orgies (which again might be Slothrop's delusions) break out of nowhere, mice who undergo Pavlovian condition talk like Cagney, sentient, revolutionary-minded lightbulbs are jerked around the cosmos, people sing songs about the joys of diving down the toilet, and various other strange events that you might associate more with surreal '90s cartoons than Great Works of Literature.

And yet Pynchon proves himself quite capable of that, too. In fact, a lot of the fun of this book is the way he bounces between emotionally involving passages of serious literary merit and the freewheeling, hilarious stupidity of the comic sections. One particularly memorable passage tells the story of a scientist who arguably lost his daughter while forced to work on the arguably reality-warping 00000 rocket that sets this novel's plot, such as it is, into motion; Pynchon also makes numerous insightful comments about the nature of Protestant predestination (specifically the pointlessness of it all... his logic seems to be that, since we're all doomed in the first place, any sort of spiritual belief won't help anyone any - the gleeful misanthropy on display here is yet more of the fun for me), conspiracy theories (I love how the government sends its opponents chasing small and completely unrealistic conspiracies here to cover up for their real plots), the horrors of war, love, the whole deal behind paranoia and how it's a completely unfeasible and impossible way to live your life because it only fragments your mind... yeah, Gravity's Rainbow's one of those big ol' doorstopper novels that just pitches everything at you and doesn't really care if you're up for catching it or not.

So you're going to have to be willing to check your expectations entirely at the door and roll with Pynchon and his ideas here, but if you are, you'll find yourself rewarded by what could very well be the most batshit novel ever written... hell, just the humor veers from scatalogical to self-referential to satirical, to say the least of the surreal horror, the graphic sex, the trips into hell, and all the other wackiness that go along with the thought-provoking meditations on the human condition Pynchon's fond of pitching in there almost completely at random. I went with it, and I came out with arguably my new favorite novel (yes, I'm aware I've cycled through three favorite novels in my time at Goodreads alone... this is sort of what happens when you're me) and a novel I don't imagine myself forgetting about anytime soon.

By the way, you're telling me that Frank Miller illustrated an edition of this book? Then this is, by far, the best thing Frank Miller's ever been involved with.

at 902 pages, this sprawling piece of literature has every sick idea known to human, some hallucinatory, some real, some both. Though this was a pain in the ass at times, I hoped it'd never end, but again, ironically i paced through this. This is probably where you start Pynchon, though Lot 49 is shorter, and Inherent Vice is accessible, I feel like I was duped with my premonition of Pynchon being hip and rad and everything along those lines. Moving from Germany to Kazakhstan to London only in a span of a page, GR keeps moving all the time along with dead men taking up narratives here and there. There's Pavlovian psychology, Nazi stuff, coprophagia, degenerate sex, sadism, war, rockets, Inflammable plastics, conspiracies, history, along with the god's gorgeous creation Slothorp's paranoia! If this pissed people in 1973 there's no way Pynchon could get published as a new author in 2020. If at all he puts out another book before fading away, I'd probably have one last chance to be relevant to Pynchon-era. I've been wanting to talk to people about GR, but internet has given me enough material to be satisfied. And the best part, unlike the case of DFW, I've got 5 more Pynchon books to read. So that's a first-tier pursuit worth pursuing.

90th book of 2021. Artist for this review is American painter Jackson Pollock.

Talking to my German grandmother, trying to explain the plot of the novel since she asks (‘Have you got a new one?’ a common question which never gives any context but I luckily understand it means what novel I am currently reading?), and decide to go for it, to mention several things but generally omit most of the sex/penises/erections/etc.: so I say, for starters, it’s a mad book set in WW2. My granny, after all, was once a child being taken from Germany on the Kindertransport, the War making her (and her brother) an orphan. Eyes wide as I continue saying, “It’s about the V-2 rockets that are so fast that the sound of their exploding occurs after they have hit their target, so one would never hear it coming. . .” She shakes her head, sez: “Jolly nuisance. . .” Living with dementia and schizophrenia, conversations are limited to several stock answers; jolly nuisance is reserved for the worst of things, the realisation of mortality, the pain in her legs that persists and makes them shake, anything on the BBC News that startles her, and now, V-2 rockets. But I press on, cautious of her wide eyes, almost, fear?, at the mention of the rockets, and say, “There are hundreds of characters and one of the main ones (main ones?) is a character called Slothrop!” That makes her laugh. For all her paranoia, she laughs a lot (brightly coloured flowers: funny; birds tweeting loudly: funny; cars honking their horns: funny; anyone else laughing near her: funny: infectious).


“One: Number 31”—1950

Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel I started half-heartedly about a year ago, read some 100 pages and found other things more interesting. Once, talking to Dr Swan (codename), at university, about The Crying of Lot 49, we discovered shared opinions about Pynchon (though admittedly mine was rather minimal on knowledge): Pynchon, whether he is a genius or not, I suppose he could be, writes novels that are so scattered, so ridiculous, so wild, that any emotional investment is impossible and therefore Swan could never will himself to care. He is on the wrong side of postmodernism for me [Swan said], apart from the writers he adored like Vonnegut. True to this day, I didn’t care about a single character in the novel. Not always a bad thing. And here? Not entirely a bad thing. Famous for having over 400 characters, it’s quite clear that Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t trying to make us fall in love with characters and have a joyous/easy read. I once read someone describe the novel as an exploded bomb reconstructed as a novel. Apt. On closing the final page last night well past midnight I had the usual moment of keeping my hand on the book and allowing the scenes that remained in my head to float about, visit me. It was quite the storm, a storm of erections, boners, penetration, sperm, rockets, toilets, paedophilia, incest(?), literal shit-eating. . . sadly the most disturbing elements of the novel did remain in my head: Zwolfkinder, the infrequent descriptions of sex with children, the sex throughout which prevails as utterly revolting and bizarre. It does often beg the all important question. Why?


“Convergence”—1952
(Funnily enough I used this Pollock painting in my Infinite Jest review. Funnily enough the two novels are very similar.)

The last days of WW2, the V-2 rocket, the overarching paranoia, these things hurtle the novel on. At times it rarely feels like it’s about anything. Scenes barrage the reader, characters swim in and out of the narrative with almost no introduction, no “character”. The last 100 pages or so feel completely abstract, Pynchon almost does away with the main characters and we are, instead, attacked with more crazy scenes, strange characters. Byron the Bulb, a sentient lightbulb, is one such character in the novel. This we accept as much as we accept that Slothrop’s (laughter) erections have anything to do with the V-2 rocket, and that where he sleeps with women will become a missile-strike site several days later. It may be connected, it may not be.

(When I post this review They will undoubtedly read it. They will wonder why I didn’t like the novel more, perhaps They will confirm the fact that I am not intelligent enough to appreciate the novel’s complexity. The problem with the Internet is whatever I do They know, They see. The worst part is you can never prove that They are reading everything (essentially your mind, your thoughts), but you know. They probably know that you know and yet that doesn’t stop Them; that makes it more fun for Them. It is far more fun for Them that you know, that you are conscious of it, that you know every time you think, They think. No, every time you think, They hear. They have their ear against the wall of your mind and They hear every whisper from the other side. They hear.)


“The Deep”—1953

Pynchon’s writing is sometimes brilliant, so brilliant that I like to imagine it is a product of his time studying under Nabokov at Cornell university. (I read once that Nabokov was asked about T. Pynchon and he admitted he didn’t recall such a boy in his class, but, but, Vera did. All she could recollect was that his work (Mrs Nabokov helped Nabokov mark papers, apparently) was a strange mix of typewritten and handwritten, breaking suddenly from being typed into his strange handwriting and then starting again being typed—incidentally, a little scattered and disjointed, like his later works?) If we compare these two lines which appear in the very same paragraph we can see Pynchon’s oscillating tone, line-by-line most of the time: ‘The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl.’ Yup. And yet, several lines below this horrible line: ‘A late butterfly pale as an eyelid winks aimlessly out over the stalks of new hay.’ Remarkably different. Most pressingly, the novel is supposed to be funny. People do find it funny. Other than mildly amusing scenes, I didn’t find the novel funny at all. In fact, in the whole novel the only bit I would say, “That’s funny”, is this, which I underlined and wrote in the margin “Heh”,
n  

Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could tell!

n
You see, I already need to read it again. The novel spins with speed, unravelling. I found myself returning to some of the things I underlined in the first 100 pages of the novel, when the prose was a little less abstract, and finding gems that later echo deeper, ‘“It’s eminently fair,” Roger now cynical, looking very young, she thinks. “Everyone’s equal. Same chance of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket.”’ Or, probably still one of my favourite bits in the entire tome:
n  

Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out... a few feet of film run backwards... the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what's already death and burning... a ghost in the sky...

n
So anyway it’s really about the 00000, but that’s for you to find out. A William S. Burroughs Shotgun Art of a novel. No no, a Jackson Pollock of a novel. ‘An exploded bomb reconstructed as a novel,’ credited to no one, some Pynchon-character(less) character somewhere. The 00000. All the erections and sex between the pages, all the characters breaking into song, the chilling lines of prose where Pynchon stops messing and starts—what?—writing? A big old mess that will for some reason stay with you. Unlike anything else. Not always a good thing but sometimes. Mr Pynchon, I don’t know. Mr Pynchon, if you say so.

GR fits into a sui generis genre of alternative history meets non-fiction meets musical comedy. The comical and unbelievable elements are all mixed up with very hard facts about 1945 and the beginning of the post-war world. I'm beginning to get a handle on it even if the many many characters and their interrelationships are still confusing to me. I still have my battered copy, bought in high school at the (long defunct) Upper West Side Shakespeare and Company and having accompanied me all these years:



Some basic themes are:

1. a conspiracy theory/ alternative history about the cartels like IG Farben and American corporations reaching ultimate synergy at the end of WWII, and bringing us the modern world and a certain Richard M. Schlubb a.k.a. Nixon.

2. Slothrop, l'homme moyen, as the ultimate test consumer, in fact an actual guinea pig, the Weberian Protestant and his God-driven ethos of chosen versus preterite, re-routinized by the rising bureaucracies/conspiracies. The worshipper becomes our ideal docile consumer-worker. My pet theory is that despite all of the correlating factors mentioned by Pynchon, sexual, chemical, mystical, ancestral, these are all red herrings and the rocket strikes and his erections are both random, but matching by chance, and Slothrop is thus revealed as our ideal future test subject, the totally average oversexed, paranoid American consumer, ready for exploitation like a sacrificial Jesus figure, which in some ways he becomes.

3. A European culture of sex-death and the inorganic deeply rooted in German romanticism, and coming to full flower in the mass extermination of WWII, but in 1945 becoming less and less mystical and more embodied, routinized in the spirit of technology and commerce, as a Weberian might put it,

4. OR maybe it's all a joke! "Beschissen, Freundchen!" April Fools Day fell on Easter Sunday in 1945. No conspiracy, no nothing, just a blind instinctual careening toward death, like the mindless Rocket after Brennschluss. It was 1973 after all and the world had gone to total shit. Not that things got any better in 1980 and 2000! The joke of Gravity's Rainbow has now become the reality we live inside, with protest and conspiracy-paranoia merely factored in as another controlled and conditioned response to total domination, body and soul. On the other hand Paranoia functions in Pynchon as a kind of sinister comfort against the possibility of true chaos, a la the tychism of Henry Adams. None of his conspiracies or the would-be conspirators themselves ever really comes off as that genuine center of control.

By the way, when I first read this I thought that Pynchon was a smart chap and mock-historian. But I now sense the use of language, even the poetry of some well crafted phrases, and the clever circular hopscotch patterning he uses in lieu of plot. There is also some halcyon writing here, as in the story of Franz Poekler. There are certain elements of 60's era "white guilt" and almost an ancestral sin Pynchon is trying to expiate (his family is quite prominent in New England history), elements which date the book and which I find jejeune, like some of the humor. But it's a classic, no doubt about it.

Someday I would like to write an essay about the similarities between GR and Melville's The Confidence Man. They are both April Fool's Jokes and parodies of the Christian calendar, and broadsides at American culture.

Next stop (perhaps): Levine and Leverenz Mindful Pleasures, a superb collection of essays on V and GR.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN WW2 HE GETS ERECTIONS.

Gather ‘round, everyone, and hear the tale of why the reasoning (not the rejection itself, mind you) behind the rejection of this novel for the Pulitzer Prize of ’74 fucking pisses me off.

Their reason? Obscenity. I would hope that they at least wrote an essay justifying their decision that went beyond an insipid mix of morally outraged blatherings and oblique mentions of coprophilia (he ate what? Poop? Oh, we cannot stand for this we simply must not accept this and god forbid we even think for a moment on the context or, you know, try to understand).

Because right before, right before this event that in my particular edition takes up a mere two pages out of seven hundred and sixty, yes, 760, count ’em, of wonder and glory that I will expand upon later once I have clearly demonstrated the idiocy of the rejection, yes, right before the passage that describes the horrific act in all its gory detail, we have:

n  They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet…not it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement—that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from her communiqués of vertigo, nausea, and pain….Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…n

I have never been in a war. I do not claim to understand the agony that those who participate go through, neither the soldier nor the civilian. But this I can recognize, this horrid disconnection from reality that results from society blocking you off from the realities of life with words, words, worthless words that rise like so much smoke and fall like so much ash when you realize it is all lies and there is nothing, nothing to prepare you for the truth of life and you become exquisitely aware of what They have conditioned you to be. And the question arises of whether life in this sleazed and sycophantic lubricant is worth it, and reality dims to a faint question of hunger and thirst, and your thoughts clamor at you to the edge of the precipice and all you can think about is how a permanent vacation from all this banality of evil would be nice. Very nice indeed. And the only thing that can draw you back is some confirmation that through all the living muck you are indeed alive. What is an easier answer to that eternal question than pain? Better yet, what is a more conscientious answer than pain, willingly inflicted upon the self in a controlled and safe environment, rather than going out and inflicting oneself on others in the forms of murder, rape, and physical destruction? With that in mind, who dares claim that they, an untouched outsider, have the right to condemn such a thing?

What is even worse than this flimsy excuse is what was lost when the baby, with so much joyous potential and wondrous insight, was flung out with the merest trickle of slightly smelly bathwater, flung to die on the streets for showing itself as being human.

Do you know what was lost? Knowledge, and better yet, a love of knowledge, sheer ecstasy at the mere sight of knowledge, adoration of subjects ranging from geography to organic chemistry to folk lore of cultures other than European to religions other than European to philosophical meanderings upon death and life and lust and shit and piss and the War, the War in none of its popular culture trappings of honor and glory and instead in its vulgar horror of wasted lives and idiotic bashings and the eternal chance of being blown to smitherings no matter if you were suffering in the worst of concentration camps or if you had found some small and precious moment of laughter in these bleak and desperate times, run by Them. Always by Them. They, who know the rules and run the show and will catch you by the genitals and nail you to the rate race and leave you to run or hang, silently screaming in pleasure all the way in an invisible construct too devious for words.

Why? Because it is the very foundations of what Homo Sapien is built upon, that instinctive organism that found itself growing a shell of thought, of conscience, enough to persuade itself that it was beyond all those biological trappings, those helpless desires, those inane fears, those shameful pleasures. Because when faced with death, the natural response is life, and the natural precursor is procreation, and the natural instigator is, what? Some call it love. Others call it lust. And perhaps it would be that clean if you ignored all that social indoctrination, all those millennia of cultural bonds and civilized underpinnings, the conformation of the animal to a world of new materials, new ideas, new awareness of pain and terror in the face of an overall useless existence. If you force a creature to like something and live with it from day one, and then keep to the beat their descendants forever on, you better be ready for a blending of the biological instinct and the cultural indoctrination. You better be ready for the fetish, those inexplicable psychological bonds between a whole range of objects and ideologies, all linked up to the evolutionary instinct, the need to fuck.

And when you put these individuals, who have adapted to strictly controlled world in ways that would put Casanova to shame, into a pressure cooker of death and destruction and technology specifically calibrated to rend bodies in a grotesquely unbelievable artistry, a World War that made the previous paltry and has not yet been surpassed? Furthermore, when you get Them, who sense all of this, in addition to sensing how society readily acquiesces to stories of violent rape and yet frowns on the consensual sexual relations that happen to deviate from the norm? That calls the former an inevitability brought upon by the victims themselves, and the latter a perversion, a deviation, a thing of disgust and shame? Then, dear Reader, you have the conspiracy of the millennia, where War drives sex drives shame drives settling under the thumb of Them who caters to your secret erotic delight. Who drives the War. For what? Money, of course. Ah ha, you say, of course. That excuses everything.

Regardless, seems a bit wonky, no? Seems a bit, well, conducive to discussion of how civilization chooses to harness the biological drive, how it silently condones rape and loudly condemns the erratic spillover of voluntary intercourse, no matter how privately or safely it is conducted, no?

Finally, going back to the knowledge. Right now, the liberal arts and the hard sciences hate each other. Loathe each other entirely. I’ve been on both sides, and I’ve heard the same story riddled in pride and ignorant contempt and secret fear from both. I’ve even experienced both, back before I got a handle on things and started to understand the gorgeous beauty inherent in both, which exists in both the masterfully derived equations from which we control the heavens, to the powerfully themed piece of literature that speaks to the souls centuries after conception. And you know which book combines that all in a singular, sexy package? Do you know which book not only breaks the rules of what the general populace deems is the proper way to write a novel, but blurs and cracks and subsumes the boundaries between the knowledge deemed ‘nerdy’ and the knowledge deemed ‘useless’ and wraps them all in a glory that only wishes to expand the appreciation for worlds both mathematical and geographical, both emotional and quantifiable, where a sunset is appreciated for its blend of colors as well as the wondrous calculations of the atmosphere that generate such a sight? All the while skipping over emotional raptures and objective information, capturing the tragically beautiful persistence of the human spirit in nine pages recounting the tale of soldiers caroling one winter’s night; the horrific capabilities of the human spirit in thirty-six pages that range from the fervent desire to breach the horizons and surpass stagnant conceptions of possibility, to the helpless lust in the face of overwhelming obliteration of body and soul, finally ending with complete disconnection except for one last push, one last tiny effort of goodwill.

Simply, this is not an issue with the book, which chooses not to follow the path of literature referencing literature referencing literature ad infinitum, hardening the bubble to an insoluble force field of fear and close-minded intolerance. Which, by the way, makes it perfect for teaching, small excerpts taken out of a context that still retains enormous amounts of contextual information, spanning scopes of knowledge and lines of reasoning with simple skips of words and sentences. No, this is an issue with education itself, the handling of separate subjects in separate ways that result in the same lesson. We learn to hate learning, whether it be by the mindless cramming of scientific gobbledygook or the training to view books as a sponge to be soaked dry of every pointless and emotionally draining detail. We are taught by those who have found refuge in the ideological constraints, concentrated themselves in high enough amounts of personal pride and vicious disdain for anything that lies outsides the traditions of their specific field. We are trained to hate neutrality and loathe those who refuse to subsume their selves under a single formula, see them as traitors to the cause.

As if the human mind, ever metamorphosing in endless streams of fickle time and violent happenstance, constantly shifting in reaction to similar seething cauldrons of fate and fortune, is a block that once fitted can never go back. As if empathy is equivalent to proposal, as if understanding the viewpoints of others without being able to ignore their faults is a secret sign of defending said faults. As if any other reaction to capture bonding (born and bred and colonized and commercialized) beyond stoic subservience (be grateful you have been passed over) is not a screaming across the sky for survival, is not only heresy. It is evil.

Where is the joy? Where is that feeling of acquiring something and loving it so much that one wishes to show it to others, help them understand that this thing they may have feared has so much beauty and really is not so frightening or impossible to comprehend? Where is the recognition of that conspiracy of the ‘Other’, subconsciously mandated as a survival technique (incomprehension leads to fear leads to anger leads to prejudice leads to incomprehension) and now subconsciously harnessed by ‘Them’, a recognition that does not stop and gaze wistfully over to the Zone of action? Ignorance is bliss is the true evil of neutrality, and those loaded words are used to good measure of their full range of context.

---

I’m not going to lie to you. This book is hard. The only reason I got what I did out of it is due to the following personal characteristics that were acquired by pure chance:

-Love for the German Language
-Formulaic Education in Engineering (specializing in Polymers) Greatly Exceeding that of FE in English
-Penchant for Iconoclasm (sociocultural, sexual, linguistic, you name it, I will break it and make it bleed for the purpose of my own understanding and comfort)
-Reverential Devotion to Literature
-Experience (for every rule I break, I break my own brain over books like these)

That’s my side of the equation. This is how I cheat. I can’t cheat for you, but trust me, the test is worth everything.

---

Epilogue

Anonymous: YOU CONDONE COPROPHILIA?
Aubrey: I’m sorry?
Anonymous: I just finished your review of Gravity’s Rainbow, and YOU CONDONE COPROPHILIA? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Aubrey: Déjà vu.
Anonymous: What?
Aubrey: Irony.
Anonymous: YOU’RE SICK IF YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY.
Aubrey: Okay. You know what. Closure. I get it. Here, all nicely formatted and quotable.

n  “Looking back on things, it seems to me that whatever the fuck is wrong with me is in some way related to whatever the fuck is wrong with Pynchon. And if that is indeed the case, well. I can live with that.”

t-Aubrey (June 16, 2013)n

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.

110319: learned 'byron the bulb' appears in many sequences of the book, perhaps signficantly, perhaps zelig- but i am not really encouraged to look for him...

301116: later addition. i am just making a bookshelf for new wave science fiction, remember reading that this was even up for a Hugo award (popular sf award), but did not win. some critic says this was a lost opportunity to establish critical value of the entire genre of science fiction. i do not know if it is possible to say one book would do it- but this book certainly is concerned with technology, with science and military, with multiple perspectives, with storytelling techniques, with hallucinogenic, sometimes hilarious vignettes. blurbs on the paperback claimed it as the most important work by a living author, so in my youth at u i read this. and was so proud. other readers claimed to admire it, but no one claimed to love it. my thought is that to fully understand say Ulysses it helps you the reader are likely educated to familiarity with Homer etc, whereas for this Pynchon perhaps you need to know chemistry, psychology- Freudian and behaviourist, ww2 history...

060916 ??? 80s: first review (by memory): this is years (decades...) since i read it. and not too likely to read again, not an easy read, not just in writing but also in so many ideas, so few characters. laughter, puzzlement, admiration, confusion, scene after scene. some critical work i once read offered to explain themes and navigate the plot, it is never a to b or even a to z that matters, not a=a or a=b, but there must be some reason for the disorder. quite possibly the comic vignettes are only interested in immersing the reader in a comic mindset, open to exactly how absurd this war is, despite all the public relations. of the hundreds and hundreds of pages and hundreds of something like characters, of the paranoid plots that engenders in memory more the various deconstructions of the ideas- that is, what critical work i have read- rather than all the goofy names, weird events, layers of espionage farces, musical routines, the traipsing through Zone of Europe in ww2, the history, the dissolution of our protagonist, the quest for the ultimate rocket (or explanation for the world), the little map correlations or strange causal parallels of missile strikes and erections... it is the half-page introduction, abduction, rescue, of Byron the (light)bulb, that persists in recall...

it seems every generation has a literary touchstone work or author (for me a much shorter work: Less than Zero by ellis), this was a bit before my time as an adult reader, but i had heard of it, i had expected it, i had really enjoyed it but perhaps more through critical discourse than the text itself... and now further details educated by philosophy even if not the sort implicit in tech and science, i can think of rereading it- but there are many books to read before i try... there are other Pomo works to read...

“Tienes la oportunidad de salir corriendo. Pero estas cosas estallan primero y después las oyes llegar. A no ser que estés muerto, entonces sí que no las oyes.
-Lo mismo que en la infantería. Nunca oyes el estallido de la que te toca.
-Sí, pero…
-Intenta pensar que se trata de una enorme bala, Slothrop. Con aletas.
-¡Dios mío! – Sus dientes entrechocan. ¡Vaya modo de tranquilizarme!”

Thomas Pynchon es uno de esos bichos raros de la literatura, tal vez equiparable a sus compatriotas John Kennedy Toole o J. D. Salinger. Tipos extraños, esquivos, huraños; que escriben su literatura todo lo ocultan y se esconden para siempre.
Apenas se tienen unas pocas referencias acerca de él. Inclusive muy pocas fotos, casi ninguna. Y todas viejas, de cuando era joven y era conscripto en el ejército norteamericano. Y nada más…
Ecléctico, errático, caleidoscópico, desconcertante y obsceno, la historia de “El arco iris de gravedad” se desarrolla entre el virtuosismo narrativo del autor y la profundidad de temas y situaciones que se tratan en él.
La acción transcurre entre 1944 y 1945, a finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, entre las ruinas de la devastada Berlín o en Londres y también en otras ciudades de Europa, todo esto sin una ilación muy ajustada que digamos, sino más bien con saltos de una ciudad en otra, dependiendo de donde se encuentre nuestro héroe Slothrop.
El argumento es aún más absurdo y estrambótico: el teniente Tyrone Slothrop tiene la habilidad y percepción de saber cuándo caerán las famosas bombas V1 y V2 creadas por Von Braun para los nazis ya que estas están recubiertas de un componente aislante llamado Imipolex G, inventado por un científico llamado Laszlo Jamf de quien no se conoce paradero y a su vez, las partes pudendas de Slothrop han sido acondicionadas con el mismo material, lo que hace que cada vez que se dispara una de estas bombas, Slothrop tiene una erección.
Todo es extraño en la novela, como por ejemplo los nombres, en donde la invención de Pynchon no tiene límites: Tyrone Slothrop, Blodgett Waxwing, Edwin Treacle, Rollo Groast, Géza Rózsavölgyi o Aaron Throwster. Solo por nombrar a algunos.
Un detalle muy importante es que realmente no me esperaba que en semejante novela ambientada en los fines de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y en Europa es que aparezca un personaje argentino y además que Pynchon tenga tantos conocimientos de nuestro país. Supongo que porque leyó (tal vez mucho) a Jorge Luis Borges.
El increíble encuentro de Slothrop con un argentino llamado Francisco Squalidozzi en donde, utilizando pocos párrafos y diálogos, Pynchon avizora el desastre que Perón iniciaría a partir de la década del '40 en la Argentina vuelve a aparecer nuevamente en el tercer capítulo con otros personajes argentinos que han capturado un submarino alemán en las costas del Uruguay.
Me sorprenden notablemente los conocimientos que Pynchon tiene de Argentina, de nuestro vocabulario, incluso el lunfardo, provincias y costumbres.
Si hasta escribe sobre el Martin Fierro...
A lo largo del tercer capítulo llamado "En la zona" que es el más extenso del libro (508 páginas en mi edición de las 1.148 que tiene el libro), Slothrop va cruzándose con los personajes más extraños, locos y oníricos, como en una mezcla la de "Alicia en el país de las maravillas" con los personajes más absurdos de las novelas de Kafka.
No he leído nada parecido a "El arco iris de gravedad" que me haya desconcertado, desesperado y agobiado tanto con la excepción del "Finnegans Wake" de James Joyce.
Por momentos me sentí completamente perdido en la intención que el autor quiso darle a la novela y además parece que la narración no va hacia ningún lado sino que cae en un laberinto enloquecedor creado por Pynchon y en el que él mismo junto con Slothrop también cae.
La incoherencia parece ser el hilo conductor del argumento y el libro es demasiado denso para lectores desprevenidos.
En conclusión “El arco iris de gravedad” es un auténtico delirio de cabo a rabo y cuesta encontrarle una cohesión.
Dicen que el libro posee dos guías de lectura que ayudan a su entendimiento. Me hubiera encantado encontrarlas para ordenar un poco mejor mis ideas en semejante cantidad de páginas.
Lo disparatado, hilarante y absurdo le ganan a cualquier trama o argumento que el autor quiera darle, lo cual, sumado a la lectura de las 1.148 páginas que trae el volumen, dejan al lector realmente agotado y por momentos con ganas de revolear al libro por la ventana.
Esto no significa que los lectores que quieran abordar “El arco iris de gravedad” no lo intenten.
Sólo quiero advertirles que Thomas Pynchon no se los hará para nada fácil. Suerte…

“It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here”

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow pg 657

I actually thought this book’s difficult reputation was undeserved, but then I hit the last 50 pages which are…opaque, to say the least, and changed my mind. The book expands rapidly, entropically, and then collapses under its own gravity. There’s a whole lot of (new) stuff thrown at you right there at the end, much of which I’m still trying to make heads or tails of. But the very final sections are absolutely coherent and perfect, a crowning finish to an equally perfect book.

I just think it’s really brilliant, Pynchon understood the world in 1970 in a way that I doubt most folks, myself included, understand it now. One thing I can’t understand is how the Pulitzer committee didn’t recognize the genius of this work, to me it was so obvious reading the thing that this was cut a rung above almost everything else. Although I certainly do see where they got “obscene” - there’s a lot of graphic, but thematic, sexual violence in these pages. But there’s a lot of laughs too, and a lot of tangents, and a lot of brilliant sections of prose

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

To be honest, I may not be smart enough to understand Pynchon. Very stream of consciousness with lots of excellent prose, but no discernible narrative that I can follow. I guess something about World War II and rockets.