The Granddaddy of Them All
A long, laudatory review of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Illustration by Charles Shields
A screaming comes across the sky…
Introduction
Like the Rose Bowl, Gravity’s Rainbow is the Granddaddy of Them All. In the 50 years since Thomas Pynchon’s towering, astonishing, brilliant, intimidating, and hilarious novel was published, it has only become more clear that never before or since in the history of literature has so ambitious a vision been so perfectly executed. It is the greatest novel of all time, and my favorite, and this review is an attempt to convince you of the former and therefore make the case that you should read it. And that’s how I’ll start: everyone can benefit from Gravity’s Rainbow.
GR dropped on the American consciousness and literary community in 1973 something like the V2 rockets it describes the motion of in its title: without warning, and with utterly devastating effects. Many were thrilled by what they realized (correctly) was a reinvention of the entire possibilities of language and the scope of ideas it can express; famed critic Richard Poirier, in the Saturday Review, praised the book and its author, declaring that “[m]ore than any other living writer,” Pynchon “has caught the inward movements of our time in outward manifestations of art and technology.” [See the bottom of this page for a collection of links to different writings about GR, including Poirier’s brilliant review.]
Others, stuck in modernist ways of thinking in a post-WWII (and therefore postmodern) world, couldn’t handle the book on any terms: the Pulitzer Advisory Board infamously described GR, when rejecting the jury’s recommendation of the novel for the 1974 award for fiction, as “turgid,” “unreadable,” “overwritten,” and “obscene.” The Pulitzer Advisory Board, then as now, doesn’t know (to borrow a phrase from GR) shit from shinola.
Whether they loved or loathed the book, what everyone basically agreed on was: holy shit, we’ve never seen anything even remotely like this before. “Groundbreaking” isn’t always synonymous with “good,” but in this case, Pynchon had taken on a task so large, important, and difficult that no one else had bothered even to try: seizing the 20th Century’s greatest triumphs and greatest horrors by the scruff of the neck and somehow getting them down on paper. From that unforgettable opening line above (“A screaming…”), he did it all with supreme authorial skill and style, and the result is 760 pages of almost impossibly imaginative, well-researched, compelling, and authentic storytelling, a genuine masterpiece in the history of human art.
How did he do it?
Analysis, Part I: The Usual Suspects
We’ll begin by examining GR through the usual literary suspects of plot, characters, and setting.
A. Plot.Let’s start with the plot, or at least attempt to. Depending how you break it down, there is either one overall surpassingly complicated plot, or a tree of interconnected plots of varying complexity and screen time. I’ll go with the second approach.
The main plot begins in 1944 London, where a strange phenomenon involving the book’s “main character,” 20-something American Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, has been noticed by various Allied bureaucratic powers: every time Slothrop sleeps with a woman, a few days later a German V2 supersonic rocket falls in the exact place where he did it. These bureaucratic powers, including a cast of scientist misfits at a psychological research facility called “The White Visitation,” plus a whole host of intelligence/military/security forces collectively and facelessly known as Them, slowly orchestrate Slothrop’s life to understand and harness this strange skill of his. When he finally realizes that They’re after him, at a casino on the French Riviera, he slips his pursuers and spends the next several hundred pages bumbling, drinking, carousing, and generally getting mixed up in all sorts of schemes across postwar Europe. More on those schemes later.
This alternately nightmarish and comedic landscape of a destroyed Germany is referred to as the Zone, and various actions by various characters in this space dominate the book’s longest section, Part 3, “In the Zone.” In his travails across the Zone, Slothrop becomes involved in a search for the object at the heart of GR’s mystery: a special V2 rocket, number 00000, said to be launched carrying an unknown object called the Schwarzgerrat (“black instrument” or “black device”), wrapped in a new plastic called Imipolex G. Why is Slothrop interested in this rocket? Because he learns that Imipolex G was invented by the same guy, Laszlo Jamf, who sexually conditioned an infant Slothrop in a series of experiments, which may (or may not) explain the London phenomenon everyone is after him for in the first place. With me so far?
The other plots relate to the main one in that it turns out that a lot of other people are also connected to, or looking for, or attempting to build a facsimile of, rocket number 00000. The first group revolves around Lieutenant Weissman, later called Captain Blicero, the book’s essential antagonist, a German rocket officer. Blicero, it is gradually revealed, not only is the master of some weird sex triangles in German Southwest Africa before the war and in Germany during it, but was the architect and commander of the Schwarzgerrat and the rocket that was launched with it aboard.
Next up is the Hereros, an African tribe transported to Germany after German conquests in Southwest Africa in the decades before the war (Pynchon refers to this period at length in his first novel, V., as well). The Hereros are led by Oberst Enzian—who was Blicero’s, uh, companion, when Blicero was in Africa—and are obsessed with building their own V2 rocket from scavenged pieces of other rockets they find around the Zone. There’s also some inter-Herero drama, as a power struggle between Enzian and rival tribal leaders regarding the fate and future of the Hereros underlies their long quest for rocket-capability.
Still another main storyline focuses on the Russian intelligence officer Vaslav Tchtcherine, who’s after the Hereros because Enzian is his half-brother (his father had been a sailor sent briefly to Africa on a Russian naval mission), and he wants to destroy the dark half of himself. Tchtcherine’s backstory in Central Asia is also explored at length.
Several ancillary plots and characters also relate to the ones above, including an Argentine submarine full of weirdo poets and artists, a bunch of dope fiends in Berlin that Slothrop somehow latches onto, an aging movie star and her child that run with a crazed bunch of drunken elites on a cruise liner (that Slothrop finds himself on), a low-level German rocket scientist separated from his wife and daughter and forced to live a life under Their spell, and one Major Duane Marvy, an American asshole who’s also after Slothrop.
Okay, deep breath. Even all that hardly does service to the amount of noise Pynchon can make happen on every page, and the depth and complexity of GR’s story. It’s honestly pretty impressive he managed to fit all of it into “only” 760 pages. But what should stand out here is: holy hell, this has to be one of the most interesting and unique storylines ever put on paper. The imaginative power of these interlocking stories about Americans, Europeans, and Africans, so tightly wound across the sick landscape of 1944-45 Europe, is absolutely unmatched by anyone else who’s ever written anything. If that summary didn’t make you want to read the book (and find out what the hell the Schwarzgerrat is!), then I must offer my apologies to TP for failing to convey the sheer narrative compulsion of his book.
B. Characters.Obviously, characters are intricately tied to plot (what is “plot” but movement and actions of characters), so we’ll look at GR’s cast next.
Kurt Vonnegut once said something that should govern all authors: every character should want something, even if it’s as simple as a glass of water. Well, Pynchon’s characters have desires slightly more complex than glasses of water (in GR, it would be booze anyways), but every single one of them has something they are trying to achieve. Furthermore, those individual goals stem from individualized backstories, so that a character’s goal makes sense, and they attempt to achieve their goals using ways only they would utilize.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized the astronomical lengths Pynchon went to to ensure that the motivations of every single one of his 400 characters has a basis that is understandable to the reader. He is willing to, and often does, go pages out of his way to provide context for even the most insignificant character’s goals. Not only does every character have a “glass of water,” there is always a “because” that explains why they want whatever their “glass” is. Pynchon guarantees that we know why his characters want what they want, even when they themselves don’t fully understand their motivations. This, to undersell it, is really good writing.
What’s important to note about the dizzying plotlines above is that despite their immense scope in time and space, at no point does the narrative feel inauthentic. The characters of this book, some 400 of them, are so fully realized in their portrayals that the book’s head-twisting array of storylines never feels forced; as hard as it is to believe, and as difficult as it is to write, the plots of GR (and its themes, concepts, locations, ideas, everything) arise organically from the people running around its pages. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that’s how good fiction works.
The contrasting goals of different characters are what generate each layer of the story. For a nice easy example, weirdo psychologist Edward Pointsman wants to capture and castrate Slothrop for research purposes, and Slothrop, remarkably, doesn’t want that, and would rather escape with his balls intact. For a more involved example, one sect of the Herero population is attempting to reduce the tribe’s birth rate to zero to erase their people because of the stain of European colonialism now forever inherent in their blood, while an opposing Herero group fervently believes in their rocket mission and wants to perpetuate their bloodlines to ensure their machinist dreams will be fulfilled by their ancestors.
This book, whatever you may have heard, is about people, human beings of a million stripes who, each in their own way, are trying to accomplish something. If this were not the case, the book would not work. (That’s why The Recognitions, William Gaddis’ thousand-page pile of baloney, fails.) It would merely be a colossal boring mess that reads like a lecture. Instead, GR is the greatest novel of all time, carried by the most memorable cast of merry (and not-so-merry) players ever drawn up.
These tensions between, among, and within characters propel this book the way an ethanol/water mixture vaulted the V2 toward London: with tremendous energy and awe-inspiring power.
C. Setting.Another major contributing factor to the book’s success is the authenticity of its settings. Locations and eras as diverse as wartorn London, German Southwest Africa in the 1900s, pre- and post-Hitler Berlin, the steppes of Central Asia in the 1930s, the French Riviera during the war, and innumerable German cities and towns emerging from the hell of V-E day—all of them feel real. Pynchon must have done a staggering amount of research for this book just for his settings alone, all of them places and times he never could have visited (he was born in 1937 and raised in upstate New York).
That validity to the settings gives the characters’ actions and motivations that play out across them a vibe I can best describe as “unforced” or “natural.” While a lot of bizarre shit happens, it always feels organic to the narrative, to the time and place, and to the character doing whatever it happens to be. Anyone could have looked at photos of 1944 London and described what he saw. But Pynchon’s settings, while superb in physical detail, go ten steps further via the references the characters drop and the accuracy of the minutest details of life.
These include, for pretty much every location: very minor celebrities, archaic and obscure traditions, long-forgotten news events, fads, clothing fabrics, foods, songs and movies that no one remembered in 1973, much less 2023, scientists and artists and actors, local histories, drinks and liquors, black market economies, incidents that no one in living memory had experienced, since-defunct brands of every kind of household item, foreign languages, oral histories, candy, streets and avenues and back alleys, vehicles motorized and not, architectural preferences, radio broadcasts, newspapers, and of course anything and everything unique only to the setting the book is currently in—that is, the detritus of life, the most recondite of things, the most common of everyday objects, the debris that cling to our lives and give them depth. It’s like if a book published in 2057 casually described the exact contents of your mom’s junk drawer right now, down to the brand of stapler she owns.
But these objects and items and other local paraphernalia are never listed or explicitly described, only mentioned in passing by characters, the way they form a silent scenery in real life. They are as quiet as the set in a play, but the book is so well-researched that he is able to capture how people felt in a particular time and place, as though he himself had lived through it. As another reviewer has said, I have no idea how Pynchon does this. But he does, and the book, already so ripe with meaning and intricacy, becomes richer still.
Red pill or blue pill?
Analysis, Part II: The Challenge and Triumph of the Text
Reading Gravity’s Rainbow is not a difficult undertaking because of the usual literary speed bumps, like Ulysses’ stream-of-consciousness or Infinite Jest’s ultra-lengthy paragraphs or Shakespeare’s elevated archaic syntax. GR is challenging because it’s different from all other works, like somehow it’s written on a wavelength that no other book you’ve ever read is. But the great joy of reading GR—and it is a joyful experience—is that once you get into it, your brain will begin to pick up its frequency, tune in to its radio station. Though the book remains relentlessly, deliberately, stubbornly challenging, once you become attuned to its vibrations, the reading process only gets easier, and things start to really click along at a compulsive pace.
The best elucidation of how GR “works,” on purely a textual level, comes from John Semley’s excellent GR reading guide Proverbs for Paranoids, which I used to help me on my re-read earlier this year:
“This is, to a large extent, how the novel itself ‘works,’ narrative-wise: the narrator will open on a character, ‘zoom into’ their story, shift to another character within that story, zoom in again, etc. Point-of-view constantly shifts. It’s like a free-floating consciousness gloms onto a character or scenario and explores it. Seemingly anything can be imbued with perspective, or personality.”
(I actually emailed Semley a few weeks ago and got a kind response a few days later. I mention this to point out a fact that might not be obvious: there is an enormous online community of Pynchon fans, any one of whom would be more than happy to answer any questions you might ever have about the Mad Preacher and his books. One of the best things about reading GR is that you join a really interesting and terrifically rich discourse surrounding the book, which is constantly under discussion in all kinds of online forums, Wikis, and boards.)
Given that’s how the book operates, what words and syntax does Pynchon use to accomplish this? One surprising fact for first-time readers, including myself four years ago, given the book’s intimidating reputation, is how simple and clear some of the sentences are, and how “readable” most of it is. That is, while you’ll certainly spend some time re-reading paragraphs thinking “what the hell did that mean,” that’s the exception, not the rule. It took me a while to realize why that’s the case, but after I did I couldn’t unsee it: Pynchon has a poet’s sense of meter.
What do I mean? This:
There is a hidden side to prose (indeed, to all language) that most writers have no idea exists: the rhythm of syllables. Poets, or at least good ones from before the days when everyone wrote stuff like Rupi Kaur, are far more cognizant of this due to the reader’s anticipated flow via line breaks. When you read “roses are red, violets are blue, today is Tuesday, so hello to you!,” your brain automatically fills in a rhythm to those lines, even though I just made them up and you’ve never read them before. Shakespeare is the greatest practitioner of syllabic mastery ever, as he explicitly wrote his plays in iambic pentameter: every line is ten syllables, five pairings of stressed/unstressed. This is in part what makes them come far more alive on stage than on paper.
But that’s verse, not prose. Novelists rarely bother to construct sentences that flow like poems do, as paragraphs are not expected to rhyme or match syllable counts. But some very rare writers do, and the two greatest prose stylists of all time—Pynchon and Philip Roth—fill their books with sentences that could balance on single points, so perfectly constructed are they.
With Pynchon especially, his is a remarkably supple, adaptable, and changeable syntax. In GR, any word can precede any other, and any sentence of any length or content could be followed by any other sentence of any length or content, and any literary style can be juxtaposed at random with any other. Yet somehow it all flows. GR is a mighty river, utterly sweeping the reader along, because TP has built its sentences into brilliant syllabic-conscious structures that propel the reader like a bullet without his ever noticing it. For all his mathematical learning, for all his explication of every aspect of life that is non-literary, Pynchon is as literary as it is possible to be. He’s been called a “mathematician of prose,” and I could not devise a more apt description.
So—what’s a good use of syllabic-conscious construction? Shakespeare went for ten per line, but generally, any even number of total syllables in a sentence/phrase will do. Good things come in pairs, especially syllables (this is sometimes called duple meter). Furthermore, symmetrical construction is highly desirable. For example, an 8-syllable sentence composed of three phrases, the first 3 syllables, the middle 2, and the final 3 again, would function as a precisely balanced seesaw of a sentence, hinging on itself, revolving around its own center, yet capable of readerly propulsion from beginning to end.
This is probably all still sounding wishy-washy, so let’s look at some examples from GR. First up:
“God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana.”
This sentence comes just eight pages into the book. (I know that because I kept a list of pages that had good/interesting sentences on them, as you should whenever you read any book.) Take a minute to count the syllables in this line. Go ahead. I’d say pause the video but this is a written review.
Okay. You’ll have noticed that not only does the sentence have 18 total syllables, it is formed in three sections of precisely six syllables each. And does it not flow beautifully? Each of the three phrases unfolds like a flower, until by the end we have a gorgeous bouquet of words, finished with that incredible simile of the V2 rocket looking like a “steel banana.” (The Rocket is, of course, a phallic symbol along with everything else.) This sentence purrs along like a brand-new Camaro. And it’s easy to read, easy to comprehend, and fairly short! This is the kind of thing Pynchon is capable of, and this is only one example among thousands in GR of rapid, stunning, effective prose.
Let’s look at a second, longer example:
“But if it’s in the air, right here, right now, then the rocket follows from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we’ll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.”
Pynchon’s sentences aren’t only perfect in solo, they build upon one another to grow in effect when aggregated. The paragraph above is like snowball rolling down a Looney Tunes hill, growing bigger and bigger until it takes out Wile E. Coyote at the bottom or something. Every one of the five sentences has an even number of syllables. Furthermore, every comma-delimited phrase within those sentences also has an even number of syllables. Everything is balanced, even, perfectly taut, no wasted words, yet still communicating a stunning idea: that precognition of the Rocket’s landing sites may be within Slothrop’s unconscious grasp.
Third and last example:
“It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology...by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,’ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding ahh more, more....The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...”
Not only does this paragraph function as one of several “thesis statements” that appear periodically in the book, it’s a good representative sample of the kind of linguistic devices Pynchon is willing and able to utilize: capitalized common nouns, italics, parenthetical information, ellipses, em-dashes, personification of non-humans, etc. Plus, of course, it’s built via perfect syllabic blocks. In fact, I’d argue that there’s an instance here of Pynchon going out of his way to maintain an even syllable count: the addition of the second “more” means the sentence has a total count divisible by two, while without it it would not. Pynchon knows, man. I’m not just making stuff up here, impressing my own ideas onto his words. He understands language as well as any poet, novelist, or playwright who ever put pen to paper. All we have to do is appreciate it.
To communicate the ideas GR does, to untangle (or entangle) a plot as complicated as its is, to provide the encyclopedic detail required of such an enormous effort—to do all that, while still maintaining the utmost precision in sentence stress, syllabic count and placement, and literary syntax—well, that’s your Rose Bowl game-winning drive. This displays a level of linguistic mastery that no other human has ever displayed. You may still not know what I’m talking about, but just trust me: Pynchon is the greatest sentence-level writer in history.
Read GR, and you’ll find yourself getting pulled along by the sentences, words, commas, and periods themselves. You do not have to press START to get going in GR. It is already on. Its engine will take you wherever you want to go.
Analysis, Part III: Get Out Your Books, It’s Time for Class
A. Encyclopedia.All of the events, characters, and linguistic achievements above, remarkable and compelling as they are, surely would not alone have made the book’s reputation what it is. GR is famous for being “dense,” a term I’ve always found somewhat nebulous when it comes to fiction—as a kid I thought it meant the pages were thinner and the physical book was literally denser. When it comes to the prose, though, what does it mean to be “dense”?
For GR, its density clearly comes in part from the vast array of characters and plots (as a synonym for “complex”), but it’s given extra “thickness” by the intellectual register of its ideas. GR is not “about everything,” as you may have heard, but it is about a lot of things, many in crushing detail and a stunningly high level of learning. This book is razor-smart, man—it’s like 800 pages of the world’s most insightful person delivering you funny messages about how every important thing works, sometimes so directly you feel like it’s being beamed into your skull.
Here’s a list of some of the topics covered at length in GR: Pavlovian psychology, statistics, interwar German films and filmmakers, fart jokes, WWII, American pop songs of the 30s and 40s, chemical compounds, sex jokes, classical music, war, international economic cartels, slapstick comedy, drugs and narcotics of all kinds, kazoos, American B-movies, seances and other communications with the dead, sex (with just about anyone, anything, and everything), geopolitics, genocide, and, of course, rockets, rocketry, ballistics, the history of rocket development, the mathematics and physics governing a rocket’s flight, and both singular experiences of being the firer and the fired-upon.
Other books claim this encyclopedic nature as well, of course, but most of them (like The Recognitions) attain this via boring lists and essays that detract immensely from the story at hand. What’s different about Pynchon is that he never lectures. Though the research process for GR must have spanned years of exhaustive effort, all its complicated ideas from numerous fields arise through characterization—at no point do you feel that eye-rolling sense of “oh, here we go with the author explaining shit again.” Pynchon’s too good of a writer to make that mistake. The story and its characters generate the various topics, not the other way around.
For example, Edward Pointsman, a psychologist, and his colleague Roger Mexico, a statistician, hold lively debates about behaviorism and Poisson distributions because they are well-crafted characters discussing their professions, not because Pynchon is attempting to show off. More than any other novel in history, the education one receives from reading GR never feels forced or stuffy—in fact, it’s quite thrilling to be exposed to so many interesting topics/events/people/references. One finds oneself Googling names and concepts out of curiosity, not frustration.
For ideas as diverse and complex as those in the list above are, this is no insignificant feat.
B. Thematic Brilliance, or How the World Works.I just provided some sense of the different things you’ll learn in GR, but more important are the ideas it presents in conjunction with everything else.
Here’s an incomplete list of the major themes in GR: race relations and their functions throughout time (the “rainbow” of the title also may allude to the spectrum of human skin tones), colonialism and its effects on both colonizer and colonized, the forces of government and military in individual lives, the history of humanity as a flow of money, paranoia in every form, human history as a struggle between the individual and the system, human history as a struggle between the elite and the subjugated, human history as tragedy and farce, war as a useful vehicle for power structures, spiritual modes beyond the Abrahamic religions providing equal validity, supernatural forces, and man’s Faustian quest to find meaning, purpose, and agency in a world determined to control him.
(The biggest theme of all—the Rocket and its implications—will be discussed at the end of this review.)
These are big ideas!
Obviously. The stakes of this book are the theory and practice of human beings, more or less. It’s a pretty lofty goal for any writer, but luckily we have Pynchon willing to take it on. I’ll only examine a few of them here, as together they are too complex to distill to anything less than 760 pages.
What I want to focus on is the book’s recurring dichotomy of Preterite and Elect. These terms come from Calvinism, an old-time Christian sect that believed in predestination: the idea that whether you’re going to Hell (as a member of the Preterite) or Heaven (one of the Elect) is determined before you’re even born. Pynchon adapts this idea to the human-determined groups of rulers and ruled, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Basically, if you’re one of the few rich and powerful, you’re one of the Elect, and if you’re just one of the millions of faceless masses, you’re a card-carrying member of the Preterite.
The book spends most of its time with various members of the Preterite, which is embodied in Slothrop. He is the ultimate pawn in the Elect’s game: buffeted by military, intelligence, economic, industrial, and academic forces that control and govern his life. Pynchon is arguing that human history is the story of the Elect’s subjugation of everyone else, from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs forcing slaves to build their pyramids to the modern military-industrial complex that awards trillion-dollar deals to defense contractors and recruits average citizens to fight wars. Writing the book while Vietnam was occurring definitely influenced these ideas in Pynchon’s head, with songs like “Fortunate Son” summarizing similar feelings.
WWII in particular represented a new kind of warfare, which Pynchon believes—and, well, open your third eye and it’s a pretty compelling case—to have been mass death at scale simply as political theater. The Elect sure as hell didn’t get any poorer or less powerful because of millions of the Preterite fighting and dying miserable deaths from 1939 - 1945. Hell, mega-corporations in both Allied and Axis countries, like Krupp Steel, IG Farben, and Shell Oil (all repeatedly name-dropped in the book) experienced record profits thanks to the war. Re-read the third example quote I cited above when talking about the prose, then give this “thesis statement” from about halfway through a go:
“Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be trusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”
These ideas would have been anathema in 1945, but the vast Vietnam anti-war movement and the chaos of the ‘60s gave Pynchon a far more receptive platform than he would’ve received thirty years earlier. The fifty years hence have only, of course, proved him more right. That it’s a cynical view of human history doesn’t diminish its importance or its insight. Among everything else it does, GR is an absolutely spot-on revelation of how our lives are influenced by forces beyond our control, by people more powerful than us, and by the flow of money from poor to rich, and rich to richer.
One of the most compelling theories I’ve seen about why, exactly, GR exists at all, is that it’s Pynchon’s apology letter to the world for working at Boeing early in his career and therefore contributing to the vast and near-infinitely powerful military/industrial machine that so dehumanizes the Preterite across the globe. One can well imagine Pynchon in his one-room apartment in Pasadena, the Rose Bowl a few blocks away, sweating profusely in the late-60s California heat, shades drawn, heart pounding, a reefer in his mouth, writing in a cramped scrawl on quartile paper the drafts of GR while the Nixon years and Vietnam burned all around him, deeply remorseful for having helped the Elect in their dominion and attempting, through his art, to clue others in to ways to subjugate the power systems holding all of us under their sway. A mad preacher, looking to spread a new gospel for all the world’s congregation.
These battles weren’t new in 1973—people have been staging rebellions since government first was created—and they’re certainly not finished yet, as any of the large number of people who hate Congress will tell you. (And it’s not like armed conflict itself has ceased to exist, plus Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to record profits for Exxon and several other huge corporate entities.) But Pynchon paints the portrait of the war, Elect vs. Preterite, so clearly, so convincingly, that once you read the book you never can see the world the same way again. This is what makes the book, reading in 2023, feel so urgent, so relevant, so true.
If that’s not the point of literature—to change someone’s thoughts with words, and to provide insight that stands the test of time—then I’m not sure what is.
The covers of GR over the years. They’re all great, but the one with the rocket in lingerie cracks me up every time I see it.
Analysis, Part IV: Why So Serious?
By this point in the review, there may still be a fair number of you who are not convinced that reading GR is a worthwhile endeavor. From everything above you may gather that it’s damn near impossible to hold it all together, story-wise, in your head, that it’s more academically rigorous than grad classes, and in general is just a shit ton of work to get through. So allow me to introduce an element I haven’t yet spoken about: the humor of GR.
The book is funny, deliberately so, and it is funny on damn near every page. There is almost no scenario, scene, situation, or topic in the book so serious that it cannot be punctured with a smirking in-joke, spoof, slapstick moment, elaborate pun, sex reference, drug use, or any other form of high or low comedy. GR functions as a synthesis of all sorts of artistic traditions—films, comic books, literature, theater, music—and comedy is one of the most important. Pynchon is unashamedly willing to utilize every form of humor imaginable to make the story crackle and pop even more than it already is.
(That some topics do escape the jokes, as I discuss both above and later in this review, are proof that the book, and Pynchon, do deeply care about some things. The book is the poster child for postmodernism, but I’d also argue it’s a par exemplar of post-irony as well. Pynchon clearly believes some things are urgent and important.)
Slothrop himself is a classic “stooge,” a la Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin, and whenever he’s not falling out of trees or accidentally eating disgusting candy he’s getting mixed up in terrifically constructed comedic enterprises. A particular highlight, and a famous scene, involves his recruitment by an American/German drug group to retrieve a stash of weed from the Potsdam conference—which happens to be planted in President Truman’s backyard. This is just one in a long series of dazzling comic escapades that leave you both roaring with laughter and shaking your head in admiration at the inventiveness of Pynchon’s imagination.
Advice often given to Pynchon newbies, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is to, on your first read of GR, simply let the words wash over you like an ocean. Every so often you’ll find a recognizable object, a “raft” to cling to, a moment of understanding amidst all the chaos. On that first read those rafts, quite often, will be the jokes. The funny parts of the book are also often the least challenging to appreciate: Pynchon is democratically receptive to the idea of universal laughter, and he guides the reader through endless travails with comedy as a map. The world is crazy, and so is the book and its characters, and if you find yourself laughing out loud at some absurdity or sex joke—well, you’re doing just fine, both at reading GR and at life.
From pie fights fought from a hot air balloon, wild train chases through a German rocket factory, stoned debates about classical music, kazoo solos, an organized fight where the weapon isn’t a sword but a spoon, people falling on their ass, poems about having sex with rockets (in fact, any scene is liable to break out into a goofy song, poem, or musical dance number), numerous cases of mistaken identity via costumes and other disguises, to countless other comedic scenes played out across postwar Europe, it’s amazing GR ever finds time to be serious.
Analysis, Part V: Problems
Just one more note before I get to the Rocket: GR isn’t perfect. A book as long as GR has an inherent quality: every single reader will find something to like, and something to dislike. There is no literary equivalent of bowling a perfect game, as literature is subjective in a way twelve strikes in a row is not. There are simply so many different elements, sections, characters, and ideas that some parts will sit better with an individual reader than others. That’s the beauty of the book’s encyclopedic, universal nature: everyone can get something out of it, and find something to dislike. That’s sort of the point.
The book functions as a dialogue between author and reader, with TP’s version of what he thought was the best idea there on the page, and subsequently the reader’s decision whether he was right. As just mentioned—the reader is free to disagree! It’s just important to note that it’s clear in every line that Pynchon took the time and effort to consider whether a particular scene/paragraph/sentence/word was worthy of inclusion. (Way too many authors do not perform this sort of ruthless self-editing, as it is incredibly difficult. I spoke at length about this in my review of Martin Cruz Smith’s terrific Gorky Park.)
So: any problems one finds with the book are hard to argue to be objective flaws, but I, like all other readers, have some differences of opinion with TP about a few of his choices.
Unlike other commenters I’ve read online, I actually like his decision to let the book’s final section, Part 4, “disperse”—things get so zany, wild, and multi-faceted near the end that you’re just holding on for dear life. But I do take objection to his decision to have Slothrop, his main character, disperse along with the narrative. By the end, this is where we come to with Slothrop, as explained by Poirier using the novel’s words:
“He more or less simply gets lost in the novel, begins to ‘thin, to scatter,‘ until it’s doubtful that he can ever be ‘found’ again in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained.‘”
Both on my first and second readings of the book, this felt like a cop-out, saving Pynchon from having to complete any arc for Slothrop. Has he changed from his experiences? Well, maybe—but this “dispersal” removes any clarity or even meaning from that question. That bugs me on a characterization level. Not nearly enough to ruin the book, of course, but I do think it’s a flaw.
I also think that the central narrative motivator—the search for rocket number 00000—should begin sooner in the book, as it isn’t even mentioned until around page 250. I don’t see any harm in shuffling that device in the narrative deck to nearer the beginning, certainly somewhere in Part 1 (pages 1-180). Even just mentioning the rocket’s existence sooner would, in my view, have been a good idea. Whatever. It comes to dominate the book regardless.
(I don’t have any qualms about some of the more obscene sections—of which there are several—as Pynchon’s goal is to exhaust a laundry list of just about every human activity, including vices, but other readers definitely do, and with justifiable reasons.)
If you ever decide to read the book, hit me up immediately beforehand so I can loan you a copy, and then immediately afterward to discuss. Since there’s so much to sift through, and so much awesome stuff, one of the most interesting parts of any GR talk is what you found unlikable. Not many other books can say even their bad parts are good.
Analysis, Part VI: The Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For
And so, at last, we come to the Rocket.
Pretend for a minute you’re your grandparent or great-grandparent, born sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. My own still-living grandmother was born in 1932. You’re about ten years old when WWII begins, which, even if you don’t fully know what’s happening, you hear in the hushed whispers and pinched faces of adults that it is something terrible, something unprecedented not just in your childhood but, you sense, in your parents’ lives as well. There are rumors of mass death on a scale and with an efficiency unheard of in all history. Keep in mind that the most technologically advanced thing your family owns is a radio, no one will go to the moon for another thirty years, and the Great Depression is still lingering.
Flash forward to 1944. You have seen the older neighbor boys get sent off to fight and die in the killing fields of Europe or the insect-ridden islands of the Pacific. You have aged in the war’s shadow, and your parents look fifteen years older. Hitler is a word you and the other children are never allowed to utter. And news comes, in the fifth summer of the war, of a new weapon, a new death machine, that the Nazis are using to rain terror on the Allies with stupendous destructive results, and it is unstoppable.
This weapon is the V2 rocket. It is the first self-guiding ballistic missile, the first manmade machine to break the speed of sound, and the first manmade object to ever ascend into outer space. It can be launched 300 kilometers from Germany and Poland to London, where it strikes in an inherently unpredictable statistical distribution pattern, and it travels so fast that you cannot hear it coming.
To say again: it arrives before the sound of its roar does.
At home in America, you learn of this weapon by sneaking the newspaper into your bedroom when your parents are asleep, and you feel a fear unknown before in human history. You can now be killed by an enemy without ever knowing it’s coming. It would sound like a pulpy science fiction comic, but you know it is real.
These feelings are the ones that govern Gravity’s Rainbow, but they are no fiction. The Germans really did assemble their brightest minds, led by Wernher von Braun, to create the V2 and therefore revolutionize the delivery of death from one human to another. (Much the same way the Americans, at the same time, were working in secret in the New Mexico desert to develop a bomb that would send the V2 the way of the horse and buggy.) For Pynchon, the V2’s trajectory—a long, high parabola, an upside-down U (that is, rainbow-shaped and governed by gravity, which the title is assumed to refer to)—is the same arc human history has taken, with its pinnacle WWII and the V2 rocket that pushed us past the point of no return.
In V2 terminology, at the very peak of its arc the rocket reaches Brennschluss, a German word for the moment the rocket runs out of fuel and is now in free fall for the rest of the way down, with no single force on earth capable of stopping its descent. For Pynchon, WWII and the weapons it spawned was human history’s Brennschluss. We developed technology so far, and made it so efficiently deadly, that ever since then we have been in free fall with regards to our fate. The big question is still: where and when will we land?
It is those ideas that Gravity’s Rainbow is most “about,” the binding force that holds the book together. As many others have noted, the central character of GR is the Rocket itself, both the fictional number 00000 that generates the plot and the real one, the physical steel weapon that destroyed large sections of London 80 years ago and you can still find leftover ones of on display in various military history museums across the world. The Rocket is thus the ultimate “outward manifestation” of “the inward movements of our time,” as Poirier so aptly phrased it.
Near the book’s end the number 00000 is finally fired, and in that act is the fusion of all GR’s most important themes: war, sex, death, power, and the long, cold arc of impersonal statistically-determined destruction. It is a symbol for everything, and yet ultimately it is most useful to Pynchon as it was to the Nazis: as an all-too-real deliverer of death.
These ideas are compelling. They are strikingly conceived, thunderously presented, and completely convincing. They are the heart of Gravity’s Rainbow, and by the time you have finished reading the book, they are lodged in your own heart forever. They summarize our world, and they summarize our lives. GR, unsurprisingly, puts it best:
“[I]t is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children...”
Conclusion: My Theory, and Where to Go From Here
We’ve arrived at the last section of this mammoth review. Here is my final analysis of the greatest novel of all time, my own theory about GR, one I haven’t seen anyone else put forward in so many words: the central tension of Gravity’s Rainbow is the book’s war with itself.
In the red corner, there is a shocking urgency and immediacy to the fear and paranoia the book’s characters feel, as pawns in a huge game, controlled and shifted by nation-like corporations and cartels, the flow of currency and markets far more important than the winner of the war, the surveillance and string-pulling done by the military industrial complex, the ever-looming fear of physical and mental annihilation by the power of our weapons, mechanized and routinized and perfected death, and the Elect’s willingness to pull the trigger.
In the blue corner, there is comedy, and hilarity, and puns that sometimes take 20 pages to set up and execute, and laugh-out-loud jokes, and pie fights, and profoundly funny riffing on the nature of our world and our place in it, and the gleefully radical idea that the affairs of the Elect are so numerous and powerful, we of the Preterite might as well get drunk, get stoned, enjoy life as much as possible, and sometimes, thanks to the human ingenuity we still have that they long ago lost, we’ll be able to hit them where it matters most.
This tension holds from beginning to end. Somewhere along the writing process, in that one-room Pasadena apartment, Pynchon must have realized, with the greatest authorial insight ever conceived by man, that the only way to make sense of it all, to complete his task with the authenticity it demanded, to bend the world to his spell, rather than him to its, was to portray both sides of the coin. GR works because it contains both terror and triumph, puns and paranoia, jokes and fear, crippling anxiety and uproarious laughter. It is the world, from top to bottom, the post-WWII planet in 760 brilliant and beautiful pages.
The Elect still hold sway, in 1945, in 1973, and in 2023. But Part 4 of GR, “The Counterforce,” sees the common man get his licks in too, perhaps more subtly than getting blown to bits by a rocket you can’t hear coming, but ultimately in ways that might be called successful rebellions. (Though the very last page of the book may negate them. It’s sort of ambiguous, like much else in the book. Whatever.) Put another way: the blue corner’s spirit doesn’t necessarily win over the red corner’s destruction, but it sure as hell doesn’t lose either. Reading GR is the greatest affirmation of the Preterite’s role and continued survival you will ever find anywhere. There is still hope for us.
So, I urge you, at some point in your life, to listen to the sermon of the Mad Preacher from Pasadena. GR is his sacred text, his Word disseminated for us, as he is one of us. Read Gravity’s Rainbow not because it is easy, but because it is challenging and rewarding like no other artistic creation. Read Gravity’s Rainbow for yourself and for your place in the world. Read Gravity’s Rainbow to laugh and to be enlightened.
Read Gravity’s Rainbow, my friend, because no matter what yard line of life’s Rose Bowl you’re on, it’ll take you all the way home to score.
Appendix: Further Reading
Pynchon is famously private, and few photographs of or details about him are confirmed, but that hasn’t stopped countless writers from spilling oceans of ink about his life and work. I’ve read a wide variety of sources regarding Gravity’s Rainbow, so here’s a sort of annotated bibliography of the best articles I’ve found discussing the book.
Richard Poirier, The Saturday Review - March 3, 1973
The best GR review ever. It honestly functions as a useful introduction to the experience of reading the actual book, although it does contain major spoilers.
Gerald Howard - June 22, 2005
This is sort of a holy grail and took me some serious searching to find a link to it online. Finally read it a few weeks ago and it's got some incredible behind-the-scenes details about the production of the book. Howard worked at Viking Press, which published GR, a few years after it came out.
We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow
By John Semley - Feb 16, 2023
Great article that came out this year on the 50th anniversary of GR's publication. I’ve been sending this to friends ever since I read it, and as I mentioned above I’ve actually corresponded with Semley himself.
One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years
By Richard Locke - March 11, 1973
Really good review that also, at its end, is brave enough to diagnose some of GR's flaws that I tend to agree with.
By Michael Wood - 3/22/73
Another one that is not 100% glowing, which raises good questions. As you might imagine, one byproduct of reading all these reviews from the 70s makes 2023 me depressed at the current level of public discourse. Modern journalism/literature seems medieval in comparison to the intellectual register of this stuff.
The Three Equations in Gravity's Rainbow
Lance Schachterle and P. K. Aravind - 2001
Interesting and well-argued academic paper specifically examining the three equations that are found in the book.
Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon
Andrew Gordon - 1994
Not a review of GR, but rather a great article about the 60s and the overarching themes in Pynchon’s work. Plus, it offers some great tidbits about meeting the man himself.
Pynchon Wiki: Gravity’s Rainbow Home Page
Multiple authors - updated continually
This is a fan site that contains links to just about everything related to GR, has page-by-page annotations for the entire book (which I went through alongside my re-read), and contains a million different things that help illuminate or supplement the novel. Just poking around is fun on its own, even if you haven’t read the book.
