Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon’s most famous tome is one of the 20th Century’s top literary heavyweights, up on the shelf next to Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, and I dove into it as an aspiring literato, eager to add it to my “conquered classics” list. But I was totally unprepared for the novel’s explosive humor. Still one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, it follows the main character, Tyrone Slothrop, through the ruins of war-ravaged Europe, from the rooftop banana farm in London during the V2 rocket attacks, to the Herman Goering Hotel and Casino on the newly liberated French Riviera,… show more.

Gravity’s Rainbow is the granddaddy of deeply weird historical novels. From its opening line “A screaming comes across the sky” to the final few pages where the implications of that simple sentence become chillingly clear, it’s a densely populated, picaresque, almost hallucinatory WWII fantasy about Nazi Germany’s development and deployment of the V-2 rocket. Or at least it’s mainly about that. Which doesn’t even begin to hint at the intricacies of its story or the depths of its weirdness. For me, Gravity’s Rainbow is a masterclass in letting your writerly imagination off the leash, and in keeping an enormously complicated… show more.

The best reading experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve read a lot of great books. It will expand your consciousness and thrill your soul. Contains nearly everything you need to know about the confusions of the last hundred years: the paranoia, the conspiracy-mongering, the inexhaustible flirtation with sadomasochism, the ever-pressing themes of Pavlovian and Freudian psychology, the dystopian misfirings of the dominating male ego, the Frankensteinian accumulations of capitalism and subsequent corporatization of the world accompanied by its perennial buddy, the rape of the environment, the love of drugs of every composition and of movies of every genre and quality.… show more.

In the books-that-take-half-a-year-to-read category, I had to choose between this and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. While Gravity's Rainbow gets docked a point because its plot is marginally more coherent than that of Infinite Jest--by the time I finished GR, I actually had a vague idea of what had happened--it ultimately wins out because it contains:

A) A multi-page, lovingly-described journey of a solitary man's journey down a toilet drain.

B) A multi-page, lovingly-described history of an immortal light bulb.

In this monumental novel of 1973, Pynchon envisions a world that has surrendered, in the late stages of the second world war, to eruptive cognitive and moral chaos. The writing is tirelessly explosive, exhilarating, occasionally obscene, and formally liberating. Sustained over 900 pages, it is hard to encapsulate the degree to which this writing deliberately unmoors its readers from the expectations of traditional narrative and character development. No creative writing manual will teach you to write like this, and yet Pynchon’s work inspired David Foster Wallace and others of America’s recent literary golden age. I wouldn’t like to have to… show more.