Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Thomas PynchonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-01-01
ISBN: 0140283382
Number of pages: 784
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Gravity's Rainbow
Book Review: Mostly garbage
Summary: 2 Stars
I think reviewing this novel would be more difficult than reading it was, so I'm not going to bother. Here's my bottom line opinion: It is evident from the novel that Pynchon is unquestionably a smart man and more knowledgable about most things than I could ever hope to be, but Gravity's Rainbow is on the whole pretty bad.
If extracted, the mediocre main plot would occupy all of perhaps 200 pages. It might have been somewhat interesting standing on its own. But the other 650+ (!!!) pages of non value adding digression utterly ruins this novel. Occasionally humorous but mostly a tiresome chore to get through. I'm not even sure how I did it. I read it during lunch hour perhaps twice a week, over a period of maybe five or six months. Never got engrossed and only enjoyed what I was reading maybe 5%-10% of the time. But I persevered for two reasons:
1. I'd heard it was the most difficult fiction novel ever and challenging to finish. I wanted to see if I could do it.
2. I'd hoped the plot would improve further in as Slothrop neared his goal.
Ok, so I finished it but was the time spent worth it? Absolutely not, without question. And no, the plot doesn't really improve towards the end.
Don't bother.
Summary of Gravity's Rainbow
"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II."-- Edward Mendelson, The New RepublicPackaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.
Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.
That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.
Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo
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