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Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

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Aug 17, 2007 Jasper Meer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Rather than award Pynchon the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the board of that prestigious award opted to declare no winner. The three person jury for the fiction category favored Pynchon, but the fourteen member Pulitzer Prize board overruled their determination, deeming what critics would later recognize as Pynchon's magnum opus to be "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene."

Gravity's Rainbow endures as a challenging work of literature, and one I've re-read in its entirety twice Rather than award Pynchon the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the board of that prestigious award opted to declare no winner. The three person jury for the fiction category favored Pynchon, but the fourteen member Pulitzer Prize board overruled their determination, deeming what critics would later recognize as Pynchon's magnum opus to be "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene."

Gravity's Rainbow endures as a challenging work of literature, and one I've re-read in its entirety twice, but revisited in parts like a Southern Baptist grabbing for verse. And like the Bible, this book is a mess, a chaotic codex of characters, fractured timeline, and scenes held together only by readers' faith that there's a central narrative. Unlike the Bible, Gravity's Rainbow lacks the excuse of multiple authors, mistranslation, deliberately distorted transmission, and accidental or intentional omission. In this doorstop of a novel the mess is by design, but a Christian might contend the same about the good Book-with-a-capital-B.

Why keep returning to this work? Well, Pynchon can really crank out lyrical prose and vivid imagery, so I'll weakly answer that beauty for beauty's sake is enough. A stronger argument might be Pynchon captures a very messy world where his numerous protagonists play their best despite lacking a script or director, and, in this, they are very sympathetic characters to readers in the latter 20th Century and beyond. These are characters living through the horrific failed utopia of warmongering, irrational despots. They live in a vacuum without order. Fear drives them to eke out what life they can find. And the V-2 rockets, describing parabolic arcs of work against and with gravity, could land on their heads at any second.

As a final and personal note, I read Gravity's Rainbow at a very low point in my life after exiting university. A dotcom job in Portland, Oregon had evaporated, and I'd decided to return home to the south. There was no manifest destiny for me, just my mom's house in Dacula, an isolated and far-flung suburb of Atlanta. I lived there for three months before finding another dotcom job and moving out to the even more hellish suburb of Alpharetta. I picked up Pynchon because I wanted to read a few Pulitzer Prize winning fiction titles, but then discovered in the lateral way the World Wide Web works that there was a ghost winner of the prize for 1974. Intrigued, or maybe feeling empathy as one holding the mistaken, disaffected belief I was denied a prize of sorts as well at that point in life, I picked Pynchon up. What I believe he was trying to do in the novel resonated with me and still does.

Shortly after Gravity's Rainbow, I finally and belatedly read a requirement for Michael O'Rourke's University of Idaho Epistemology class. Mr. O'Rourke is a wise, bright and gentle soul for guiding his students to "The View from Nowhere" by Thomas Nagel. I'll say it's a happy accident I read Nagel's book after Gravity's Rainbow, and prescribe you do the same.

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Jun 05, 2021 D marked it as to-read

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