Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (patron-only early access / ad free)
One of the greatest novels I've ever read.
Might even be underrated.
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon BOOK REVIEW (Ad-Free) (YouTube)
Comments (10)
I read about half the book, some English/British edition of it that I had read contained no typos, and then lost the book after moving... Might finish it one day, when it resurfaces...
Uh oh. Don't do this to me Cliff. Don't put this on my reading list. I have a job, I have a cat who needs me, I can't handle this shit!
Glad you ended up sticking with it! It's funny, it's always around page 150 that people really click into it (was the case for me). Wanted to hit a point your wife brought up: The reason that the rockets fall where slothrop has sex, instead of getting an erection after they fall, is because his pavlovian programming went "Beyond the Zero" so that he's now predicting the fall of rockets rather than reacting to them, which ties into that death drive aspect of his character. Also, another point re: the Banana Breakfast – it's actually a full thematic encapsulation for the whole book. The bananas are of course a reference to dicks, rockets, and the banana republics (imperialism), but it goes further than that, because there is a specific focus on the black seeds of the bananas, tying it up in decay, putrification, black people, etc., which wraps the symbolism of death (whiteness of the inside of the banana-like Blicero, who is the white death, and paper which is the obliteration of life) with the "contaminated" blackness of true life. Lastly, yes, V. is related to GR. A lot of people consider GR to be V-2, but really they're thematically separate. I will say though, I think you'd get a hell of a kick out of the rest of his work, especially Against the Day, which is longer but easier to read.
Also, now that you've read it, genuinely can't recommend enough just going to the r/ThomasPynchon subreddit, searching Gravity's Rainbow, and then just reading all the different articles and posts about it. It's wild the number of things people have written about and related to that book. Super enjoyable experience.
I'm reading through my "Better Than Food" coffee lottery copy I won last year with my handwritten note from Cliff bookmark. It's going slowly but I've enjoyed it from the beginning, even the bananas.
Great review! This has been sitting on my shelf for over 5 years, maybe I'll finally tackle it in 2021. Currently busy with The Tunnel by William Gass, another postmodern brick of a novel.
The Crying of Lot 49 is a marvelous introduction to Pynchon. It too is a wildly entertaining madcap romp with hysterical character names and puns—and requires a significantly lesser investment of time and patience, clocking in as it does at hundreds of pages less than the count in Gravity's Rainbow.
Loved the video! I’m trying to do a Pynchon year. (I use that time frame loosely.) I mean, what better time to begin reading experimental paranoid fiction about the over production of information and conspiracy theories? Currently making my way through Against The Day. Really looking forward to Gravity’s Rainbow next!
Watching The Book Chemist’s video on it got me really excited about it and it IS good, but I’d say that it’s way too long for an encyclopedic novel with hundreds of characters. Side characters will pop up from hundreds of pages ago (I’m around page 750) and I will have only a vague idea of who they are, but with no substantial memory about the plot points surrounding them. I would say that the book is worth it but it takes about 400 pages to really become a book, for the themes to synthesize in a meaningful way. I’d suggest making use of the Pynchon Wiki (which has been a life saver) and definitely read it faster than I have so you don’t lose track of the web of characters. And just like Cliff said about Gravity’s Rainbow, you don’t really get to know the characters as much as Pynchon himself. In Against The Day they’re certainly more flat than I’d expect for having spent so much time with them. But the sheer Pynchonian imagination, scope of ideas, scenes, themes, and experimental metafiction makes up for my lack of feelings about the characters themselves. Let me put it this way: if you’re gonna read it, you’re gonna read it and it will be meaningful, but I would never recommend it to anyone because of what an undertaking it is. Beyond my complaints about length and the immense amount of characters: it is worth the trek to see the sights and have the epiphanies Pynchon worked so hard to conjure.
Did Cliff in under 20 minutes convince me to buy one of the most challenging books of all time? Yes, yes he did.