Gravity’s Rainbow in Classics Without All the Class

Dec 29, 2020 James rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: meganovels

This novel: pure dynamite. The many stops and starts preceding my reviewing this thing were probably to be expected, after experiencing much the same in my reading of it, over some four months of feelings both extreme and paradoxical: annoyed incomprehension and delight, mad disgust and awe, blessed amusement and horror, etc., until settling into a kind of sad comforted confusion by the novel's quasi-end.
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A work of impossibly mind-numbing yet -invigorating complexity, sinking to murky moral dept This novel: pure dynamite. The many stops and starts preceding my reviewing this thing were probably to be expected, after experiencing much the same in my reading of it, over some four months of feelings both extreme and paradoxical: annoyed incomprehension and delight, mad disgust and awe, blessed amusement and horror, etc., until settling into a kind of sad comforted confusion by the novel's quasi-end.
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A work of impossibly mind-numbing yet -invigorating complexity, sinking to murky moral depths but also surfacing then soaring to awesome philosophical heights, Pynchon's monsterpiece boasts a hella impressive multiplicity of ideas, themes, and forms (moving beyond the novel to include film, comic-book, theatre, musical, even mathematical formulae: in a great postmodern pastiche), which nevertheless somehow crystallises into a singular brilliance, as of a rocket's flare, exploding to amazing if discombobulatory effect. All this demands a lot, i.e., patience, humility, sheer stubbornness, even in the face of the most impenetrable passages, because their more accessible if not epiphanous counterparts lie ahead, often just around the corner: waiting like pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

"Gravity's Rainbow," like the V2/A4 rocket central to the novel and its many, many moving parts, defies conventional plot summary, yet here's my (pitiful) attempt anyway. Divided into four parts, the book roughly follows paranoid American Tyrone Slothrop during 1944 as he finds himself in the middle of serious and fast-developing shenanigans after various governments and organisations (whether British, German, Soviet) discovered the weird correlative if not causative link with rockets exploding all over Europe in places coinciding with Slothrop's sexcapedes. Now that's greatly simplifying this book, being the main thrust of a story with such smorgasbordic imagination it has things as bonkers as Pavlovian octopi, sentient pinballs, immortal light-bulbs (also sentient), superheroes, witches, seances, etc., but somehow makes them all hang together, in some tableau of beautiful chaos.

But what I enjoyed most about "Gravity's Rainbow," even when I didn’t Get It, are those frequent reassurances Pynchon plants throughout the book: that it’s Totally Okay not to understand some or all of it, that there too can be grace and humility in the not-knowing, the not-understanding. Paranoia is Slothrop’s defining characteristic, and also “Europe’s Original Sin—the latest name for that is Modern Analysis.” “Nobody,” Pynchon however cautions, “ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end.” While there’s irony in my masochistic disregard of this very good advice and nevertheless ceaselessly annotating his book to hell and back, the margins scribbled over with desperate arrows and symbols, it’s no small relief to find these occasional little kindnesses, these meta-pats on the back. ...more

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Mar 07, 2013 Leo Walsh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Intro: Gravity's Rainbow; "Now everybody--"

I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow for twenty years. The first time through, I giggled a lot at the Absurdist bits. But thought it a quaint relic of the 60's -- a slide-show of a stoner's mind. Pynchon's prose was a dense, rolling knot of imagery and alliteration. In fact, I thought, and my reread strengthened the conviction, that his prose contains the exact cadence of Ginsberg's seminal Beat masterpiece Howl .

I can report that, even ...more

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