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.'
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Was getting into this book and am missing pages! My copy goes up until page 90 then skips to page 120. Is anyone else’s copy missing pages?
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