Greg Keeler

You can't talk about Gravity's Rainbow without getting one fact straight from the start: this is a difficult book to read. Much more so than Infinite Jest, another infamously difficult book that largely doesn't deserve that title. Pynchon's sentences share a lot with David Foster Wallace's writing, in that they're often discursive and lengthy, he loves to have fun with language. This is all great when you have a handle on what's going on, but the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow is so fragmented even on a sentence level that Pynchon's tics and tricks end up working against him somewhat.

The novel flits around between a coterie of characters, is not particularly wild about giving you context or clarifying their relation until later in the novel, and those characters are often doing some seriously weird shit, usually of a sexual nature.

And that's the second part you should know about: the sex. There's a lot of it, of all kinds. Sexy sex, unsexy sex, BDSM (you know, bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism). There's even some pedophilia! And most of these, including that last one, are our main character's doing.

Like I said, there's a lot of different characters, but most of the novel centers around this US Army Lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop. Pynchon has a thing for wacky names. This Slothrop guy doesn't really make much of an appearance in Part 1—about the first 180 pages or so. This is also the part of the book where you'll be confused as all hell, so I'll sketch out some more. This is the kind of book where spoilers won't kill your enjoyment, and are actually handy for understanding how everything fits together.

Most of the characters we'll see in this first section belong to a conspiracy studying our Tyrone Slothrop. They're interested in him for a very curious reason: whenever he has sex, a few days later a V-2 rocket will impact that exact same spot.

One of the first things I liked about the novel: it really gets across how utterly terrifying the V-2 rockets were for London during the war. For those not familiar, London's experience was far different from the US's in World War II. While we just got Pearl Harbor, London was under threat for years: first by the bombers of the Blitz, then by V-1 cruise missiles that would fly along with a tiny wind driven propeller, waiting to reach the set number of rotations and then cutting the engine and falling on whatever was below.

You'd hear a sputtering noise in the distance and stop what you were doing to try and discern if it was flying directly overhead. If it was, you were frozen with fear, waiting to see if the engine would cut out. And if that sound suddenly stopped right when it was about to reach you, there were only seconds to get under something sturdy, and hope to survive the explosion. It was, to put it mildly, fucking frightening.

The V-2s were in a way, kinder. These were even more incredible machines than the V-1, built with just enough range to reach London 82 miles away. These would be launched, arc overhead in a ballistic trajectory, and then arc back down to strike London. By the time they reached the ground, they'd be traveling in excess of the speed of sound. You'd hear a sudden explosion without warning, followed by the ripping roar of the incoming trajectory. Pynchon gets quite a bit of juice out of this curious property of the V-2, how it seemed to reverse cause and effect by outrunning its own warning.

Over three thousand V-2s were launched over the course of just seven months, but what most people don't know is that less than half were aimed at London. Most were actually aimed at Antwerp in Belgium, and about one third of those scored direct hits. London actually had a respite after the first barrage, since British intelligence leaked misinformation that the rockets were missing London by about a dozen miles. The Germans corrected their fake problem, and afterwards, most of the rockets missed their mark.

But London still paid a heavy price during the attacks: over twenty seven hundred dead, six and a half thousand injured—which happens to be about the same toll as the attacks on September 11th. The guidance systems were less-than-accurate even in the best-case scenarios, so these hits were spread throughout the city. You can start to see why understanding where they would hit was so important, and why they'd be willing to entertain the wildest theories about how to do it, up to and including stuff we'd consider today as pseudo-science.

So Slothrop is in London, promiscuous as all get up, and tracking his exploits on a map—which agents are then secretly photographing to continue tracking this strange coincidence. We start to find out that Slothrop was the subject of a strange experiment when he was an infant, conditioning a reflex to an as-yet-unknown substance. It's known as the Little Tyrone experiment, echoing the Little Albert experiment which conditioned a child into being afraid of a rat and anything furry. If you took a psychology class in high-school or college, you probably heard of it.

Curiously enough, that Little Albert experiment turned out to not be as rigorous as we thought. I know, big surprise. When researchers tried to track down the original child, only identified by a pseudonym in the original research by John B. Watson, it turned out that he'd died just a few years later of hydrocephalus, where the brain cavity takes on extra fluid which increasingly impairs brain functioning if the pressure isn't relieved. If this condition was present at birth, and there is some evidence that it was, then the child was impaired at the time of the experiment causing it to be fundamentally flawed.

Though really, and this is the last of this tangent, I promise, really we should have had serious doubts from the start: Watson knew from the beginning that he wouldn't have time to desensitize the child after their four-month-long experiment, so at the end, they just sent the child back out into the world, fear of all things furry completely intact. Science was pretty fucked up back in the day.

But science was also pretty amazing—with the V-2 rocket I mentioned earlier, and the atomic bomb yet to come. These kinds of dramatic advances make the institutional acceptance of pseudoscience in the book much more plausible, similar to the earlier uptick of interest in seances around the turn of the century, with electromagnetism and other forces of nature being discovered left and right. So we see mediums, psychics, people who can change the melatonin in their skin, and a few other wacky characters in this opening portion of the novel.

Even in the midst of this insanity—and it's hard to describe the hectic first section any other way—there are some touching parts. Roger Mexico carries on a relationship with the engaged Jessica, afraid that he'll lose her to her safe fiancé. In describing some of these interrelationships, Pynchon often pulls a nifty trick of sliding his perspective between characters. You can tell because the narration will be channeling the inner thoughts and worries of one character, only to switch over to the other imperceptibly a few paragraphs later. It can be confusing, but when you're all keyed-in it is wonderful.

In Part 2, Slothrop moves onto France, and the novel becomes immensely clearer. The multiple perspectives of the beginning largely die out and we mostly follow Slothrop for the remainder of the novel. Slothrop also starts to become paranoid that he's being tracked, manipulated towards some end. I was really glad to see this paranoid mood start to assert itself, because I was more familiar with Pynchon's writing there, having read The Crying of Lot 49 and enjoying it immensely.

Slothrop's paranoia helps drive the rest of the novel, especially as he gradually discovers that it's incredibly well-founded. He's being pumped full of information about mathematics, rocketry, and other subjects relevant to V-2s, under the auspices of the conspiracy. Keeping him in one place is Katje, a beautiful woman he happened to meet while fighting off an octopus. Yeah, that happens. But even she seems to be suspicious, and Slothrop closes out this section of the book by fleeing the scene, and France altogether.

In Part 3, by far the largest chunk of the book, Slothrop wanders around the Zone, Pynchon's term for the post-war Germany. I found it incredibly striking how he evokes the aftermath of the war, especially in how he bent it towards his existing themes. In Pynchon's hands, fallen Germany becomes a region bursting in possibilities—history dethroned, and an open question as to what will take its place. An anarchist in the book even directly says as much!

For Slothrop, the possibilities end up being less political than sexual, but it's also in this third part where Pynchon's comedy action muscles really get exercised. There's a miniature-train chase within a rocket factory, an arial pie fight, and multiple disguises including a pig suit.

Gradually though, in the midst of all these miniature episodes, we find out more information about the V-2 program and a mysterious rocket numbered with five zeroes. Slothrop becomes determined to track down this rocket, and the mess of characters we met in the first part start to show up again. But there are multiple parties searching for this rocket, and it becomes a madcap race leading up to a very strange conclusion.

So after hearing all of this, the ups and the downs, I'm sure you're wondering whether all this effort is worth it. After all, the book's really dense, difficult and over 750 pages long. I was very dubious about liking it for the first 200 pages, but slogged through on the strength of its reputation.

But once the book opened up, I found myself really enjoying it. Pynchon is a really weird writer, but you'll get used to his quirks about the time that they start to really die out and he becomes much more coherent. I was really put off by some of the science deployed—like his fixation on conditioning during the opening section, bordering on mumbo-jumbo.

But at the same time, as with Lot 49, he's utterly unique in capturing a sense that there are esoteric meanings to the world that we just aren't tuned in to hearing, sub-cultures as subtle (or even as benign) as the infrastructure under our feet. And in the anything-goes madcap post-war Germany, Pynchon found an amazing setting to explore a lot of those ideas, punctuated by scenes where he balances the seriousness with cartoon-logic action sequences.

While I enjoyed the book as a whole, the esoteric nature of many sections did bug me—and I'm not sure that they needed to be that way, or if the tradeoff was entirely worth it. Lot 49, which is how I got into Pynchon, was a lot clearer and easier to read—not to mention much tighter as a work. And Infinite Jest, while not a work of similar paranoia, does carry forward a lot of Pynchon's innovations and sophistication, but is much clearer about it. I also like the intimacy of David Foster Wallace a lot better, and find his writing just more thrilling and fun. I guess you can argue that the first section functions as a kind of overture to the book, introducing key characters and such so they'd be familiar later on, but would it have killed Pynchon to signpost that stuff a bit more?

Either way, if you do decide to embark on reading Gravity's Rainbow, this is a book you'll want to build up to. I'd recommend Lot 49 for sure to get used to Pynchon's style in a much easier package. And though David Foster Wallace is a much later writer, he's a great one to exercise your reading muscles in building up to this book. For him I'd recommend starting with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then jumping into Infinite Jest, which is easier, but still a workout. If you're having trouble with even that, Wallace also has some non-fiction that's his most accessible writing of all, such as Consider the Lobster. For other handy authors, I've heard that Ulysses is handy to read before Gravity's Rainbow, but I haven't gotten around to reading it myself. I can't imagine it being any more difficult, but will have to report back on that one later.

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was a pretty unique and great experience, albeit one that took a ton of time and totally threw off my goal to read 52 books this year. I'm glad to have read it and look forward to tackling Pynchon's other books, maybe even revisiting this one sometime in the future. In the meantime, I'm glad that my next book will be way easier, whatever it'll be.… (meer)