Taste the 'Rainbow'

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  Fuck, it's a V2 rocket!

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s opus and my determined literary slog for about the last four months, finally completed last week.

For those that are unfamiliar, here is a handy equation:

Gravity’s Rainbow =

Catch-22(Dhalgren x Ulysses)^hardcore pornography
William S. Burroughs + Kafka

It is nearly 900 pages. There are over 400 named characters, many of whom appear only once, while others might be introduced early and then left for hundreds of pages, only to become integral near the close. Dozens of distinct voices providing narration. Whiplash-inducing tonality changes; from technical engineering or mathematical discussion, to philosophical digressions, to mythology/analogy, to horror, to comedy, to some truly hardcore, straight-up porn, and back again.  It encompasses an enormous pile of themes- free will vs destiny (celestial/divine and man-made), Pavlovian conditioning (sexually murderous octopi!), science and the limits of human control, sacrifice, psychology, extinction, sexuality and transgression, paranoia, insanity and self, obsession, mythical pig-heroes, immortal light-bulbs, kazoos...

The narrative of the main character, such as it was, ended over 100 pages before the novel did. Those last 100 pages provide total disintegration of plot, character, structure, hell, reality and the English language (I will grant you that these two things are not unrelated- those last 100 pages reflect the complete dissolution of that main character, among other things). The climactic action to which the main plotline was building is presumed to occur beyond the final page. Or not.

I will admit that this was at times an infuriating slog. However, however. Frequently you emerge from an eye-crossing passage of stream-of-consciousness or technical digression into episodes of pure brilliance. Laugh-out-loud screwball comedies, thrilling action pieces, beautiful instances of poignancy, bizarre wtf essays that still manage to be enthralling…and yes, some of those sex scenes were pretty damn titillating. 

I can’t even imagine what its editors thought when they read this thing- where even to begin? The consensus is that 99% of the original manuscript ended up published. Reviews were decidedly mixed. The Pullitzer fiction committee recommended it unanimously, but the full selection board opted instead to award it to…nobody. But there was also fervent praise like this, from the NYT’s reviewer: "If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them."

Um…no. But I'm glad I read it.