Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The phrase “A screaming comes across the sky” British Intelligence learns that a map of the city indicating the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, coincides exactly to a map showing the V-2 impact sites a few months after the Germans’ covert V-2 rocket bombs start dropping on London. The ramifications of this finding will send Slothrop on an incredible journey through war-torn Europe, evading an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the enigmatic Rocket 00000, through a wildly comic extravaganza that has been hailed in The New Republic as “the most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II.”
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
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His most well-known book, Gravity’s Rainbow, typifies Pynchon. Everything you’ve heard about it is true, and maybe something you haven’t heard about it as well. These extremely dense, jam-packed novels have an intriguing quality that, at least for me, is that they grow on you.
Density and intricacy are present, to be sure, but the depth of information is undeniably present. Stunning writing that occasionally burns like the rocket’s exhaust as it ascents. Hilarity. Absurdity. He frequently makes you laugh out loud. Scenes will blend, change, veer off, and then return. With this omniscient narratorial fury of character, era, and setting, he haunts the pages. And it has hypnotic qualities in a way. There isn’t a paragraph break in sight, but it reads like a literary tirade that lulls you into falling in.
At its most successful (and the reader’s most receptive) it’s like some literary flow-state, and may frequently leave you drifting, as if in the dream; unconscious of how you got there, liminal periods of transition lost, with only the present approximating anything dependable. He can reveal the historical, his ability to reveal the personal personal personal. He has the ability to reveal the personal personal personal. He has his ability to reveal You may ask how Thomas Pynchon is so familiar with the predicament of the dodo bird on the island of Mauritius after witnessing him rapidly and successfully take a period, recent or not, and create a character there. Or how he is so familiar with the atrocities committed by the Germans on the Herero people. A casual ability to characterize things frequently turns out to be revelatory.
Although Gravity’s Rainbow is a book about war, the themes of sex and anarchy that it explores jumped out to me more as I read. It’s clear how Pynchon’s Bohemian phase affected his work at this point, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was experimenting with a variety of things. During this time, which coincided with GR’s development, drugs, sex, and literature all seemed to be connected. Gravity’s Rainbow, which features both main and minor characters engaging in various sexual vices, is arguably the closest thing to a pornographic Pulitzer Prize nominee. There are a few sequences in particular that are so notorious that Pynchon was basically robbed of his one and only chance to win the Pulitzer Prize because of one of them, which involves voluntary coprophagia.
