I finished another book today (The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin), so I need to write up a review of Gravity’s Rainbow, which I finished last week, otherwise I will fall behind. My day was otherwise pretty normal.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is a big book. My copy has 776 pages. The novel takes place during the end of the Second World War, and (loosely) follows the increasingly paranoid behavior of an American soldier named Tyrone Slothrop, his surveillance by a shadowy intergovernmental agency, and the possible connection between his erections and the falling of the Nazi V2 rockets. It is a spectacularly odd book, often devolving into bizarre tangents on topics ranging from calculus to the extinction of the dodo bird.
At its best, the book’s sprawling ambition captures a sense of impending dread about the transition from the late-industrial to information economy. Characters are trapped in huge, interlocking systems of power, over which they have no control, and seemingly neither does anyone else. There is a great tragedy in their lack of agency. Characters do bad things, and know that they are doing bad things, and understand the forces which are driving them to do bad things, but are still unable to do anything else. Increased access to information has heightened our gaze but not our grasp. Today’s world is simultaneously more visible and less tangible than ever, and the result is an endlessly-escalating paranoia.
Despite the gravitas of its subject matter, the book is quite funny. Yes, the prose is often pretentious, but there’s also a chapter about being sexually aroused by eating shit. There’s a lot going on, and Pynchon does a remarkable job of holding it all together, at least for the first three quarters of the book.
That said, I have mixed feelings about some elements of the book. The ending is a bit of a mess (albeit intentionally). The last hundred pages or so takes an increasingly postmodern turn, matching the mental breakdown of its characters with a heightened narrative instability; skipping across space and time, blending hallucinatory and real. There are good thematic reasons for doing this, but the result was that the ending was the most-difficult, least-enjoyable part of the book.
My other big problem was the characters. There’s something like a hundred characters in this book and none of them have any distinguishing features beyond their wacky names. Once again, there are solid thematic reasons for this; characters are defined not by their internal qualities, but by their circumstances. They are identical pawns, differing only by their position within the system, trapped by the accident of their births. Sometimes this was very poignant. Other times, it felt kinda difficult to get through a nearly-800-page book when there aren’t any memorable characters. The book has emotion, but it is always a God’s-eye, top-down sort of pathos, never anything personal or intimate. The characters are agents for the plot, nothing more.
In sum, the scope of Gravity’s Rainbow is incredible. Its ambition largely succeeds, and the grandeur of its scale allows it to invoke feelings that other books are unable to articulate. It is the sort of book that bleeds into your waking mind throughout the day; to read the whole thing is to live with it for months, to internalize its lenses and see the world anew. It’s definitely not for everyone, and I can understand why someone could read thirty pages, hate it, and give up. The book is unconventional, and it is not without flaws. That said, even though it wasn’t my favorite book ever, it does represent, for me, the high-water mark for a certain kind of fiction. Give it a go if you’ve got some months to spare.
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