Gravity's Rainbow[GRAVITYS RAINBOW PENGUIN CLASS][Paperback]

Years ago, I read this novel when it first came out. I recommended it to a colleague who was a decorated WWII veteran. As luck would have it, he died before it was returned. I intended to read it again over the years, but never got around to it. I suggest Googling the title and reading the analysis. It’s more complex than I had even thought.Now, the actual book. I received a used, paperback. Not a problem. I can deal with it. The packaging was a mess, but the book survived.

The writing seemed to be pretentious and arrogant.

This review of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW will not merely contain spoilers but be one. No sane discussion of this book will fail to give away key points. The entire thing is a soufflé. I stick a pin in it and it will pop. But it will still be edible. Imagine this book as yet unread. I can tell you what I thought of it, but if you haven't read it, it will still be, for you, an unpopped soufflé. Yes, I will tell you my thoughts on GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Think of it this way: I'm coming out of a restaurant. I recommend the soufflé. Just because I tell you about its surprising delights doesn't mean you won't feel the same surprise and delight as you taste the soufflé put before you. So, my enjoyment of the dish I just had shouldn't take away from your experience. One thing you should remember, of course, is, you may not WANT any soufflé after you read about what the characters in this 776-page waddayacallit put in their mouths.But does reading MOBY-DICK make a reader want to go whaling? Not this reader! Read on, MacDuff:That's as far as I go in trying to mimic the tone of this book. Already, I can see, from what I've written, that I simply fall into the hipsterism that Pynchon himself is never actually guilty of. I am not being facetious when I say that GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, strictly as prose, is unrivaled in American literature. Pynchon has to have had role models, but he avoids their mistakes as surely as he avoids those of his contemporaries. From my own reading experience I can say that, if Thomas Pynchon takes a cue from Melville, he categorically rejects Melville's chief flaw: The convoluted sentence. Let's say bomb-making is to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW as whaling is to MOBY-DICK. Both authors know more than 99 per cent of readers will about the professional activities of the characters in their books. Melville, of course, DOES give you something of a course in whaling. But he wants us to appreciate what a man on a whaling ship does. Pynchon knows the reader already hates physicists. (Who does one admire more? A man pulling on a rope for thirty minutes in order to raise a sail that weighs a thousand pounds or a guy in a sweaty suit working a pencil to a nub for eighteen hours?Both men are necessary to world-shaping industries. But we like the sailor automatically. We want to mock the thinker.) That both authors are describing essentially destructive industries is clear. Read MOBY-DICK again if you haven't already. It is about a world that eats its own. So is GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. Both books condemn an industry which sacrifices drones. (Ahab is not merely getting his men to join him in his mania; he has commandeered the ship HIS masters have entrusted to him. He despises the profiteers. If the fat cats allow the suffering of scores of men on each ship they send out, he, at least, will make sure the men suffer for HIM and not THEM.) MOBY-DICK and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW make the case against plutocracy. Pynchon's sentences flow, always. Melville's do so with less frequency.This leads me to another point: Because Pynchon is of our time, it is easy for us to miss that he is a very different cat from, say, Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson is saying "Here is how things look when you're on acid." Joseph Heller, wildly funny in CATCH-22, is trying to convince us of the absurdity of bureaucracy. Vonnegut, who certainly sees the world chained to the military-industrial complex, is, nevertheless, a believer in simple kindness. Not so for Pynchon. By the way, he is still alive. As of this writing - March of 2021 - he is about 84. Hunter S. Thompson would be Pynchon's age if he were still alive; Vonnegut and Heller were of the generation featuring in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. I had simply assumed Thomas Pynchon was about 96. One of the canonical novels of the Second World War was written by someone who, by all chronological indications, should have been writing about Woodstock. Instead, he delves into the mind of a morally compromised hard scientist working on rockets for the Nazis at a base just a mile from a concentration camp. And HE is the sympathetic character. (Not that he's the protagonist; but his story seems to me to be the heart of this book. It is at the very center, and I think this is deliberate. His story works as a novella. Stefan Zweig could have written it, but he killed himself during the Second World War. He was the author of THE ROYAL GAME, about a chess master. Pynchon could have written that if Zweig hadn't.) That section of the book seems to me to be in the German tradition. It is Expressionist; a literary equivalent of something by Mahler.Another reason Pynchon's prose might not seem to the average good reader particularly spectacular is that he uses the present tense. Everybody uses it now. Before about 1970, the present tense was used as a sort of parody of stage directions. (Melville and Dickens use it that way.) But by 1985 or so every think piece in the NEW YORK TIMES was written in the present tense. ("I'm trying to tie my shoe, but I keep thinking about Iran-Contra!") Pynchon uses it without pointing to it, somehow. I think, then, that Pynchon speaks the lingo, but from a deep source. I have never seen English used with such precision as in his book.While much of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is hallucination, I feel quite sure it is not meant to describe hallucination. It is, in itself, hallucinatory. I only got about thirty per cent of what I read, but as with the parts about physics or bureaucracy, when what was going on at any given moment or from paragraph to paragraph eluded me, I never got the sense that I was being asked to conclude that something was definitively the result of, say, drunkenness. This may not seem important, but, because the action is confined to (or, at least, goes no later in time than), 1944-45, I can't say, as one would when reading Ken Kesey, "Oh! This is LSD." Much of the kick of sixties and seventies literature was a Pied-Piper call to mind-altering substances. Thomas Pynchon is not interested in that. The hallucinatory quality of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is closer to fantasy writing than to De Quincey. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not of a piece with the drug advocacy of its era. Its ethos is not "Tune in, turn on, drop out." It's not even akin to A NAKED LUNCH.It is about human nature. It deals with depravity and atrocity. It is a fundamentally German novel, written in British English by an American at a time of existential terror.____________________________________As the title of my post shows, I read the 2006 edition published by Penguin. It seems to have been discontinued. I just have to say it is a really pleasing edition. I assume that, except for the cover and the copyright page, it is a duplicate of the first edition. MAYBE the pages are thicker. (Probably not; but the early aughts WERE the time of a sort of nineteenth-century look to the right-hand edge of a book: apparently uncut pages. My guess is that, in 1973, the book had evenly cut right-hand pages.) It is a testimony to the top-flight editing the major publishers adhered to in the mid-century. I don't detect a single typo. (Someone on Goodreads says that someone on Amazon says the version with "the black cover" has typos. If this is the version they mean, I have to say the typos are not apparent to me. Maybe something Pynchon wanted spelled a certain way wasn't spelled the way he meant it to be spelled, but I doubt that. I imagine he worked as closely as possible with the publishers when the first edition came out. Again, my guess is the text is exactly as it was in the '73 edition. The font is clear, the print is good, thick ink; not the faded ink we've become used to in 2021. The line of squares separating the chapters is just right for this novel. The jacket is sturdy cardboard and even has flaps. (Not that I would try to use them to mark where I was, because I wouldn't want to bend them, but I think you COULD use them. They are wider than the 776 page expanse of the book. Frank Miller created the front cover art. I don't know if he SELECTED the back cover art. Here's what the back flap tells us about this: "Front cover art by Frank Miller. Back cover: From a German D-Day leaflet showing scenes of apparent disaster in England. Design by Paul Buckley." The front cover shows what looks like an aerial view of a some bombed-out terrain, or terrain about to bombed, and the silhouette of a rocket. I wonder if it was Frank Miller or Thomas Pynchon wrote the description of the back cover? These are the things that keep me up at night!