This is a book we read back in our university days 20 years ago. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by American writer Thomas Pynchon is viewed by many literary critics as a modern classic.

It doesn’t really follow literary conventions, but the genres you can include it in are postmodern literature, science fiction, satire, war stories, paranoid fiction, and historical fiction.

In 1974, it won the American National Book Award for Fiction. But it irritated the Pullitzer Prize for Fiction board, who called it “turgid”.

Well, let’s explore this divisive one 50 years after its publication to take in its merits (and strange sexual themes).

Considerations on War and Technology in Gravity’s Rainbow

Set in Europe at the end of WWII, Gravity’s Rainbow is about the design and production of liquid-propellant V-2 rockets.

There are four parts, the first is Beyond the Zero and consists of 21 episodes. Most of these focus on events during December 1944 around the time of the Battle of the Bulge.

The various plot threads that develop have a direct, or tangential, relation to do with the development and use of V-2 rockets. In other sections of the book it details technological advances up to the Vietnam War.

Pynchon’s overriding focus seems to be cause and effect, with a historicist vision that keeps the text feeling fresh. Modern readers may appreciate that, although there’s no denying the “narrative” (as unconventional as it is) remains heavy going.

This is a book for readers who want to test themselves intellectually and try something experimental and almost mathematical in its structure.

That’s why we read it in 2003/2004, afterward realising we’re imbeciles so created this website to focus on topics such as the joys of nose picking.

For those who want to try out the book now, it’s an extensive work at over 700 pages long. Contemporary reviews acknowledged its ambition, with a New York Times review by Richard Locke in March 1973 noting it was:

“One of the longest, most difficult, most ambitious novels in years”

The review notes:

“It is Pynchon’s ambition to relate the history of Germany to that of America and indeed the entire Western world. He carefully integrates American characters and references within his European scene (Emily Dickinson is quoted as an American equivalent of Rilke) and he writes in an unmistakably American style. The various characters’ obsessive search for Blicero’s rocket recalls another mammoth American novel, Moby Dick. In Gravity’s Rainbow we find the same appetite for technical data, the deliberate bookishness, the dense exalted prose. It, too, is a voyage into space, time and human consciousness, an exploration of the Faustian impulses that drive men’s souls, a criticism of what Quentin Anderson calls the American ‘imperial self.'”

Pynchon (who’s 86 now) is an amazing writer. No denying that.

But there’s also no denying the story is heavy going, although it does reward with some remarkable interconnecting narrative structures and metaphors.

But then there’s also a lot of turgid stuff.

At the moment we’re reading a similarly enormous book in the form of James Clavell’s Shōgun (1975). 300+ pages into that, we’ve not been bored once.

When we read Gravity’s Rainbow in late 2003 to early 2004, it was during a literary phase where we read every single page of a book. We considered it part of our literary education. But that did mean we forced ourselves through the dull bits.

That and Pynchon’s over-reliance on sex.

One reviewer on the literary social platform Goodreads compiled the number of sexual references throughout Gravity’s Rainbow and found penis mentioned 40 times. Perhaps not that many for a 700+ page book, but enough to jar in the narrative.

It’s like in Luke Rhineheart’s Dice Man (1971). We also read that at uni. Great idea for a book! What helped spoil it? The constant, pointless references to the protagonist’s massive penis and other sexual stuff.

You can argue we’re having a WOKE MOB moment here, but we just find the inclusion of that boring and sleazy—writers overindulging in their fantasies.

Perhaps at the time it had more of a novel appeal and was a bit different, following on as it was from the Swinging Sixties. But these days it’s predictable to the extreme and anchors the plot down in nonsense.

That stuff aside, there’s a lot to admire in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon is hyper smart and has a vivid, berserk imagination. And you get prose like this:

“Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted 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 stimolous 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.”

Gravity’s Rainbow has a reputation for being unreadable for many. You’ll hear it’s a literary classic, give it a whirl, and be pretty stumped by it.

We checked out other verdicts online and some rave about it, others not so much (some actively despise the thing).

Our memories of it relate to our younger selves.

It was a big and exciting novel to read in our formative years, one that made us feel all grown up and clever as we brandished it at people on the bus to uni.

But now the thought of wading through it again doesn’t appeal. That’s not us saying it’s bad, it’s just not something we want to read twice. And we think for most people it’s the type of work you will read just once, go “Huh!“, and move on with your life.

Or just totally abandon after 50 pages.

We also get the feeling it’s the type of book some people will give 5/5 so they can come across as intellectually superior. We had a look at the positive reviews on Goodreads based on that theory and found one user put this as part of their rave review:

“Plangent Cries of Unemployed Tragedian and the Autoerotic Asphyxiation of Necky Undulates. Year of the Dunning-Kreugar Personal Test Kit. Rotoscoped hands superimposed on complex interpretive sulcus skating on alternating images of wartime London & Germany, subliminally laced with third image which reads; Are you in the Zone? w/ narration by Machine Learning Reconstructed Mitch Hedberg; 35mm; interminably looping; ultraviolet w/ 4D pornographical substrate embedded with oscillophotography of lower dimensional genitalia; silent w/narration. Limited release contingent upon eating six peach seeds and surviving under intense supervision; By Distributed Idea Suppression Complex Ltd.”

Indeed. Whatever that means!

Then there was that bloke taking things less seriously who’d counted up all the dirty words Pynchon used.

Our standing on this one is congratulations to the author for showcasing his brilliant imagination at work. But for readers out there who haven’t been near the thing, approach only when you feel like it.

Light reading this thing most certainly is not.

Yet as an experimental piece of historical fiction, you’ve got to credit Gravity’s Rainbow for its weird audacity.

Difficult Books: Should You Try to Read Them?

Pynchon’s work does raise the issue of notorious books and whether you should bother giving them a go.

There are famous culprits here such as Ulysees by James Joyce, which is a baffling enormity consisting of a stream of consciousness stuff. Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot is another.

We can also nod to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Reprieve, which uses simultaneous prose and is like trying to overcome a brain haemorrhage in real-time.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t read tough books.

We found a feature by Xenia Ramirez-Espain that had some interesting points on all of this. It’s in difficult books and why you should read them anyway. Here’s an extract:

“Gravity’s Rainbow has a reputation for being impenetrable, many have warned me that it is impossible to read and therefore I shouldn’t even try. When researching the hardest book to read, out of curiosity, I found that this novel is one of the first to pop up and, in a sense, these naysayers were right. In the first 100 pages alone you meet a talking dog, an octopus trained in combat and a man who chased said dog through the ruins of a building with a toilet bowl stuck to his foot.

Large amounts of the novel are designed to be incomprehensible to the average person, you will find quantum mechanics and random formulae littering the pages. You may emerge from the wreckage at the end of the story without having a single clue as to what it was about. To be completely frank, I don’t think Thomas Pynchon entirely understood what he was trying to say. It is a complete mess and yet time and time again, I found myself in awe of the prose.”

We do get the feeling you’ll have already made your mind up about Pynchon’s work based on what we’ve ranted about above.

For many, it’ll be an instant “hard pass” and you may just want to read something that doesn’t make you question the point of everything.

Yet, if you’re in a daring mood… why the hell not push yourself?