Gravity's Rainbow

Another white whale, conquered. Infinite Jest a couple of years ago, now Gravity's Rainbow. Ulysses... maybe in another couple years.Gravity's Rainbow is quintessentially Pynchon, and his most famous novel. Everything you've heard about it is true, and probably some thing you haven't heard about it as well. The interesting thing about these ultra-dense, filled-to-the-brim novels is that they grow on you; or at least they grow on me. V. for instance is a book that I've thought about often since finishing it. It wasn't a favorite, I didn't love it, and yet I've thought about it more often than many other books I've read. Why is that? What is that factor that a book like V., a book, presumably, (time will tell), like Gravity's Rainbow has? I'm not sure, but it's there, hiding atavistically beneath the text like some weird palimpsest. And you have to buy in, is the thing. You can't just pick it up off the shelf and fall in love, I don't think. Maybe some could. But you have to commit. "Buy the ticket, take the ride" and all that. It's long, it's complex, it's confusing, it's difficult. But...It's Pynchon. I've come to expect certain things from his work (and this is probably a good point to mention that I wouldn't recommend this as your first Pynchon novel; in fact, in many ways this book feels like a sequel to V.) Density, yes, complexity, for sure, but a breadth of knowledge that can't be overstated. Dazzling prose; blazing at times, like the tail end of a rocket ascending. Hilarity. Absurdity. He is often laugh out loud funny. Scenes will meld, shift, trail off and come back. He haunts the pages with this omniscient narratorial frenzy of character, time period, and location. And it's hypnotizing, after a fashion. It's like a literary rant, and it lulls you, and then you fall in, not a paragraph break in sight. At its most effective (and the reader's most receptive) it's like some textual flow-state, and can often leave you drifting, as if in dream; unaware of how you got there, liminal phases of transition lost, with only the now resembling anything reliable. He has an uncanny ability to unveil the personal in the historical. He can take a period, recent or otherwise, and birth a character there, quickly and effectively, and suddenly you are wondering how Thomas Pynchon is so intimately familiar with the plight of the dodo bird on the island of Mauritius. Or how he knows so well the horrors of the German genocide against the Herero people. It's a casual power of characterization that often proves revelatory.But here's the but. The text is challenging not just on a word-level, but a subject-level. Not for the first time Pynchon wrote scenes here that made me deeply uncomfortable. And not for the first time I knew that I was probably missing three or four layers of thematic relevance for their inclusion. But regardless, when it comes to my personal reading experience, if I miss the relevance, or the connection, it's the same as it not being there. Now, it's not Pynchon's fault that I missed it. Nor is my reaction to these scenes his fault, really. And I suppose the very act of going outside the text to research something that made me uncomfortable means that, on one level, the book got me to think. Maybe thinking hard about uncomfortable things is necessary sometimes. But again, these are all revelations that I'm engineering after the fact. Pynchon has a way of presenting things that sometimes leaves his intentions, and his own feelings about something, vague, or even completely unknown. There are pros and cons to this. And whether that external research brings me more understanding or not, whether it made me less uncomfortable or not, these are different questions. The point is, there were moments that made me stop in my tracks. These moments, paired with a general struggle to write convincing female characters, and the occasional rearing-head of outdated attitudes you'd (unfortunately) expect to see from someone born in 1937, made me feel like failing to mention any of this would feel too much like an excuse of some kind. It would feel like brushing everything under the rug, when in fact there is no rug, and all of this stuff is just laying around on the floor, and I'm simply walking through it, rather than trying to step around it.And so isn't this entertainment? Of course, it's more than entertainment. There are questions to ponder, themes to explore, cerebrally it's doing something. But still, one reads fiction, at least in part, to enjoy oneself. And so I'm short of a five-star rating here. And I'm not saying that I wasn't entertained by Gravity's Rainbow, I absolutely was. All of the praise above is just as valid as the critiques. My point is that it wasn't all fun. It's a demanding book, and truly you have to work for it. I think the question, for me, comes down to this: was it worth it? I think so, beyond a doubt. Will everyone? Surely not. So I just felt I had to represent both sides of the reading experience here. It's no walk in the park. Though, to be completely transparent, I revise my star-ratings on here all the time, and may even sneakily do so with this one, some future day. My ratings, while not meaningless, are certainly nebulous, and shouldn't be taken as gospel; by me or by anyone else.Right. I knew this would be long-winded. This book was like running a marathon. Got to keep up, got to lock in. Pynchon brings a lot to the table in this one, but some of his most prevalent themes are, of course, present. Entropy. Violence. Sexuality. Colonialism. Conspiracy. Institutions vs. Individuals. Death. But specific to this book, I thought I'd let future readers in on what they can expect...The second world war; supernatural abilities; meta-textual orchestras; Pavlovian doctors; hallucinatory dreamscapes; psychological sound barriers; shadowy organizations; sadistic, pedophillic Nazis; English candies; Poisson distributions; giant octopuses; reflexive erections; dominatrixes; decadent parties; political intrigue; subterranean mountain factories; limerick-singing ordnance troops; custard pie air-balloon battles; weird letter committees; half-brothers in the throes of destiny; Argentine anarchists; myriad paranoiacs; neurotics of every shape and size; sexually traumatized aging movie stars; island rescues; wartime barbers; immortal light bulbs; lost lemmings; pig suits; a nonstop revue; and of course... the Rocket.Any of that hit you right? Then dive in.'He is now always the same, awake or asleep—he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have become one for him.'

I just read GRAVITY'S RAINBOW twice in a row, one reading right after the other. It was good the first time through and excellent the second time. Plus, instead of paying something like thirteen dollars to read one book, I ended up paying less than seven dollars apiece to read two books. Both of them were a bargain at over seven hundred pages.I notice, though, that the Amazon price is above Amazon's ideal ten dollars. I notice also that the sentences Amazon quotes from GRAVITY reviewers are selected from very favorable reviews but, out of context, they seem like very unfavorable sentences. Of course, I figure IT'S A CONSPIRACY.Although it's a book you either love or hate, it has four times as many five-star as one-star reviews. The reviews, both raves and pans, say pretty much the same thing as professional reviewers do, so there's really not that much for me to add.I'd like to address some of the things one-star reviewers say, just for fun.First of all, there are the one-star prudes. They're right. The book has coprophagy and pedophilia, both treated non-judgmentally. If you're the kind of reader who gets upset by that, you'll have to stay away. On the other hand, it's a book about Nazis ... and for some reason nobody seems to get prudishly upset about Nazis. Pynchon is on to that little paradox, and if his prudish readers are missing it, too bad for them.Next, there are the one-star haters of Post-Modernism. They all have at least one thing in common: they think Post-Modernism is easy to recognize and every example of it is equally bad. Wow. I'd have thought that, like Romanticism, it has gone on for years and years in the hands of hundreds of different people, in music and painting, poetry and novels ... and really I can barely tell how all the examples resemble one another, can barely tell what JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR has in common with EVITA, and couldn't tell you for sure if either one of them were Post-Modern. My bad, I guess. Apparently all you have to do is call a book Post-Modern and Bingo! everybody who likes it goes to hell.There are the one-starrers who love ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is nothing like it. There are the ones who hate ULYSSES and say GRAVITY is exactly like it. These two groups should meet on neutral ground and fight until they both disappear.A couple one-starrers say GRAVITY is liberal propaganda. Hmm. Liberal propaganda that nobody can understand. That's pretty liberal. But wait! Isn't THE WASTE LAND ... conservative propaganda? And nobody can understand THE WASTE LAND either. Suddenly it all makes sense!There are the academic conspiracy one-star haters, whose complaints go something like this: When you were in high school or college, an English teacher you hated told you GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was a good book. You didn't even read what this teacher assigned, let alone what she recommended, she was such an obvious loser, but nevertheless you have ever since believed that everything she ever told you was cold, hard fact. As a result of this belief, you read GRAVITY and, under the hypnotic influence of this hated teacher, never even noticed how bad it was. That's how the academic conspiracy works, and if it weren't for the one-star haters, nobody would even know about it. What made them so bright? They hate teachers a magic tiny little bit more than you do.Last and least are the one-star reviewers who just get all crazy inside when they suspect someone else is smarter than they are. Smart people, according to these reviewers, are pseudo-intellectuals who write to impress, and writing to impress is a great sin. All their lives, these reviewers have been making sure they never write to impress, and so naturally they write the world's least impressive reviews.----- -----On the positive side, this is a very well-constructed book. The first part is prologue, and the fourth and last part is epilogue. During the epilogue, the characters fade away, sort of like the hero of TENDER IS THE NIGHT, who never realized he was Post-Modern. The second and third part are NORTH BY NORTHWEST, as discussed below.Readers of traditional novels often seem, from their comments, to be disoriented by this book. It has a lot in common with ALICE IN WONDERLAND, including an explosively dissolving dream ending. ALICE influenced FINNEGANS WAKE, which the book also builds on. It builds on William Blake's Prophetic Books too, and all these would be good training for reading GRAVITY, except that GRAVITY is the simplest of them all. In fact, Pynchon is better as an introduction to Blake than Blake is as an introduction to Pynchon. Time running backwards sort of thing.While I was reading GRAVITY, I watched Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The two are virtually identical, complete with the mysterious "they" who control the action and refuse to save the hero they're manipulating, and their easy-going Anglo-American ruthless indifference to his fate, and their ownership of the mysterious woman who sleeps with hero and villain alike. Both works made a lot of money, and they deserved to.GRAVITY also has things in common with a really challenging crossword puzzle book -- though the one-star reviewers who think no novel should challenge its readers probably think crossword puzzle books should never be sold.It's all good. I'm sure they're part of the conspiracy too. This is some wild, crazy fun.

Pynchon is one of my favourite writers. The guy is a genius in terms of prose, imagination and originality, But Gravity's Rainbow is a mess structurally. It famously has around 400 characters – many of whom you'll forget immediately and only a handful of whom have any kind of genuine personality. Some of them are mentioned once and never again. Some appear for a page or two in stories that have no connection to anything else,. Even the "main" characters originally appear without context and switch between scenes abruptly.My problem with Pynchon is that his creativity explodes on the page without order. There are connective themes, but the narrative is chopped up and shuffled as if he's writing whatever occurs to him in the moment. This, for me, isn't postmodernism or modernism. It's a lack of narrative control.Some reviewers have said that you have to approach the book without any ideas of what literature has been before – almost as if it isn't a book. They say it's more like a movie or a TV series. But it IS a book. You have to turn the pages and follow what happens. If the narrative lapses into something totally irrelevant for twenty pages that you don't understand and which seems to have no context, and which will probably never be referred to again, you have to read it anyway. Or skip it. You can pretty much skip 20-30 pages at a time and it won't make any difference.In fact, Pynchon adds a paragraph in the last section of the book in which he tells us how to read it. Essentially, we have to go with the flow and keep on reading even if it seems we've gone way off track. Everything will come right in the end. That's the promise. And it does become easier in the final part. But getting there is a matter of bloody-mindedness. You read just to read.Pynchon could have been just as brilliant but more readable. There are sections of this book that are astoundingly inventive, but you have to wade through scores of pages where you haven't got any idea what's happening. You feel like you're reading a different book. At some point, you stop caring. You lose faith.In later works such as "Inherent Vice" and "Bleeding Edge," Pynchon uses the same conspiracy narrative games but remains readable. Gravity's Rainbow is so famously unreadable not because the ideas or language are difficult, but because Pynchon refuses to accept any of the norms of conventional novelistic narrative. It's as if someone has edited together twenty great films in random order – great individual scenes, but not a movie.Pynchon remains a niche author for this reason. He could have been one of the true greats. Funnier than Vonnegut. As descriptive as McCarthy. More outrageous than Nabokov. But so, so infuriating to read. I appreciate his books as works of art, but I can't say I enjoy them. It's a pity.

I consider myself an open minded reader, a person of varying tastes and a patience to learn or understand different approaches to the art of literature.But this book? Oh my days, could you say anymore words and manage to get nowhere with a narrative.90 pages in and I barely understood what was going on, no narrative flow and too much filler. Was this man drunk or high when he wrote this? Were the reviewers also somewhat inebriated? Surely bothNot for me, probably not for you either. As another Amazon review said - Painful.

This book is unreadable.Author's writing style is bad.As George Orwell states in his magnificent book WHY I WRITE, author of this book is suffering of SHEER EGOISM; but not a healthy one,one that makes a show for others by creating a tasteless, styleless, incomprehensible narration.I could only stand until page 15; I respect all those who managed to finish the book, and on top of it, enjoyed it.

The book has merit for the beauty of the prose and can be enjoyed like Finnegan's Wake. On the down side: the pornography content seems gratuitous and the surrealism seems very dated. The novel by Philip K Dick from 20 years earlier supplied all the good parts of the plot. Pynchon's blatant plagiarism is rather shameless. Definitely not a masterpiece but I do love the prose.

Am re-reading this many years after it came out. This is so well written compared with much fiction. It still seems fresh even now. I had also wondered why the "dive into the toilet" scene in Trainspotting was very familiar - now I remember - an extraordinarily similar scene is described in this novel written many years prior to the film.