If you wanted to make for a fun hypothetical, ask yourself this: could Thomas Pynchon be nearly as successful as a writer if he was starting today? While you could argue that his era of hefty, indecipherable post-modernism epics have become old hat, there is something about his very identity that makes me believe that he’d probably either fail or be one of the great anonymous writers. Since we all have access to a computer now, there’s a chance that he could hack into a publishing company’s database and submit his confusing works. But, would he be successful?
Following the death of J.D. Salinger, Pynchon took the mantle for the most famous reclusive author. Very few pictures of him actually exist and good luck getting him to explain what any of his work means. This isn’t to say that he lacks public appearances. He has appeared TWICE on The Simpsons. It’s just that in an era where everyone’s information is public and our faces have become just as much a product, Pynchon’s lack of facial recognition is a wonderful anomaly. He exists as this giant question mark, and you either love or hate him for that.
Along with questions as to whether he had a cameo in his sole film adaptation Inherent Vice (2014), his legacy is a sprawling, confusing journey. Nowhere does that feel more apparent than with the book that will forever define his career.
There are some books you can read and move on from. While I like to think that every story has a resonance, some are more disposable than others. It’s just the harsh reality of our tastes being refined to enjoy certain narratives. We all try to stand out in some meaningful way, but it’s not always going to happen. Sometimes too much effort makes our work isolating while too little makes it even more irrelevant. We are all trying to make a story that will stand the test of time, presented with such clarity that it’s almost historical.
“Gravity’s Rainbow” is, arguably, one of the few books that manages to feel both relevant and irrelevant at the same time. In a lot of respects, this is Pynchon’s magnum opus. It’s the book that he crammed every last piece of his ideology into and created a World War II epic like no other. If you must know what “like no other” means, just know that what follows is one of the most challenging books you’ll ever read. It’s unique in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter-House Five” or Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” are singular achievements of the medium. They present war as something more absurd, neurotic, and presented with creative flourishes that are wonderful in their vulgarity. Even with all of these elements, they are essential because they describe what it feels like to be in the war.
What does “Gravity’s Rainbow” say about being at war? Literally, it’s a long story. The story follows Slothrop as he goes around testing bombs. The easiest way to sum it up is that every time Slothrop has sex, a bomb goes off. The issue is that Pynchon has an eye for the juvenile, where sex scenes will play out for pages on end. Gross-out humor abounds as dirty limericks play in theater houses. It’s at times appalling and uncomfortable, going into downright fetishistic passages at times that are either funny for being gross or disturbing for the exact same reason.
And yet, that’s only a fraction of the book. It will feel like so much more because of how vulgar it is. The language sticks, confusing you as to why this was considered publishable in the first place. It makes no sense, and yet it’s necessary to explain how Slothrop is an impulsive jerk who lives in this chaotic world. He is himself the product of testing as a child, so he has always seen sex and war as being simultaneous. That is why Pynchon manages to jump between the kink and the think.
Remember how you felt like the sex went on too long? Well, that is to ignore everything else in Pynchon’s international post-war universe. He’s constantly doing Groucho Marx impersonations while going into elaborate detail about building and testing bombs. Yes, this is a world where the low brow and high brow are constantly butting heads, and being confused is almost the point. I’ll just say it now that you may get frustrated having to spend more time on the text because you may go a whole page without understanding what is going on.
That is because Pynchon has created the ultimate game of pulling teeth. Where some moments zip by, he has the power to make a moment halt, making a simple walk across the room into a lengthy paragraph so full of detail that you think it’s important when in reality it’s just getting us a look inside of Slothrop’s head. He may be hormonal, but he’s also war-minded, trying to make sense of everything happening around him. This may be a drawn-out book, but even that feels chaotic when you stop and dissect a page.
This isn’t exactly an easy book to read. There have been competing guides released (all over 100 pages) just to provide context. The references and details are faithfully specific to a 1940s mentality that it would be hard to recognize even by the point this was published in 1973. It makes one wonder why Pynchon even went in for this much detail. Why was he so infatuated with these small details that are a bit trashy? Maybe that was the point, where he mixed something as serious as war with this deeper ongoing nonsense that existed among the people fighting.
In one very amusing detail, “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote lead the Pulitzer Advisory Board that year and refused to give Pynchon the prize. This was because he considered large parts of it unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene. To be honest, it’s not an unfair criticism. Pynchon would probably have sold the book as such. However, the idea of seeing someone as precocious as Capote reading passages like…
“You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.”
…and not being somewhat frustrated. Just when you thought that the story wouldn’t get weird enough, it adds these hallucinatory features. Sure, he could be frustrated that there are whole sections dedicated to making banana pancakes or getting an octopus off of a woman’s head, but the story’s back half becomes a bit of an endurance test. By this point, we’ve waded through such frustrating text that we just want it to be over. But… is that the point? Are we stuck in the unending ennui of war with these characters?
The idea of post-modernism is that everything has no meaning. These can be seen in the surreal late-20th century works that push the boundaries between fact and fiction, realism, and fantasy, and basically destroys narrative style in the hopes of finding something greater underneath. Pynchon isn’t the only one whose prose feels like a cryptic maze, but he’s the primary creator because it feels like he’s a bit more insane, though that may just be because he never had to answer for his work. We don’t get to know what this book is about, especially when it has such a nihilistic ending that mixes a comparison of every California freeway with the ongoing bomb imagery. The final line itself is a reference to an innocuous line that many likely forgot about from only a few hundred pages ago.
One has to wonder why this book resonates if it’s so frustrating. It would take a scholar to understand everything going on, and yet we can’t see intellectuals taking a scene involving a dirty toilet and see it as high art. That is the ultimate goal, to reflect how ridiculous this whole war has been.
And yet we can’t turn away because he’s just that good of a writer. Everything is layered in such a way that he creates a sense that we’re going through this war with a genuine degenerate. There are hundreds of characters and not all of them matter, but we’re forced to care because the story sometimes feels like it lacks a protagonist. This story is a flurry of motion, opening with a chapter on the world falling apart before building into Slothrop’s journey through Europe. We see imagery that is as much culled from missile testing as there are displaced people from various forms of violence
That is the underlying genius of “Gravity’s Rainbow.” When the story sounds like it’s going to be at its most insufferably silly, it shifts to something dark and dramatic. Most of all, it paints this portrait of negligent forces stomping around the globe, leaving their accidents everywhere they fall. There’s irreverent humor, but it also has time to discuss how whites colonized Africa and stole its identity. Again, Pynchon requires you to think about it before you ever find an answer, meaning that it all blurs together.
Some will miss the point, but there’s a good chance that the novel is designed for at least a part of every chapter to go over somebody else’s head. For those willing to take one sentence and determine why he’s so obsessed with Fay Wray in King Kong (1933), they’ll find a depth of information that those doing a straight read can’t. Even then, one has to ask how close we should look at these details for answers. At a certain point, it loses all meaning, but there are some that become valuable if you care to look. This is the reason that it’s the post-modern masterpiece that best exemplifies the genre. It pretty much defines the ambiguity of war through the eyes of people who didn’t think to stop and make the world a better place.
It’s also an exercise in something that literature rarely allows. While everything that came before wouldn’t suggest it, the novel is also written this way to show how confusing the world is for the smartest and dumbest of us. If you’re dumber, a lot of this will be confusing. You’ll read a page and feel encouraged to throw it out a window and into the street, smiling as a Chevrolet throws the pages up in confetti. That’s because he wants to create this intellectual divide, where we’re all in this journey of war together and we want to understand the madness. It only makes sense if we’re confused by the bigger words. Once we know that, what is the bigger meaning? We’re all going to die anyway. Similarly, you can be too smart and above the dirty limericks, but we all have to put up with it.
I’ll fully confess that I often love the idea of this novel more than my experience reading it. While I do love books that create this subliminal experience of reading (see also: David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”), living through that frustration and uncertainty of how long a page will take to read can be bothersome. I come out appreciating that journey like I have lived through Pynchon’s prosaic war. I love the thought of what I read, feeling like I understood what I knew just to realize that there are experts who know so much more. I have my own belief that this is a story about the global impact of war through an absurdist comedy, but that feels like I’m selling it short. That amount of math an absurd comedy don’t make.
Still, I read those passages on GoodReads when preparing this essay and I found myself impressed with the way he puts words together. Much like his reclusiveness, you wonder what exists out of the frame where we can’t see it. Maybe Pynchon lives on our block and we don’t know it. Even then, he’s admitted that he doesn’t even remember writing this book, so any questions I’d have for him would go unanswered. That is the wonder of “Gravity’s Rainbow,/” which turns war into a reading experience like no other. You may be frustrated and find it hard to understand, but that’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
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