03-26-2013, 12:03 PM
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
Yes, I finished it. It only took me 37.5 years to finish.
Actually, I gave up on it in the mid-'70s on my first attempt to read it (soon after it came out). Amusingly, I talked my good friend Chuck into buying a copy as well and we took the journey together -- except that I abandoned it 150-200 pages in while Chuck plowed through all 900 pages. His peeved remark at the time was, "Gee, you talk me into reading it, and then you bail? How exactly does that work?"
But there didn't seem much point to finishing something I couldn't grok.
Still, Gravity's Rainbow has haunted me over those long years. Somehow Lady Cranefly and I ended up with a copy, which kept looking down on me from a high bookshelf. Also, I've always felt a bit guilty for bailing on Chuck. So finally I pulled it down and resolved to read it beginning to end.
It took many weeks and a lot of effort, but when all was read and done, Gravity's Rainbow proved to be a richly rewarding experience and well worth the effort.
Or so they will tell you on a lot of websites devoted to Pynchon, or specifically to Gravity's Rainbow. Let me clear the air on the prevailing lofty and totally crazy claim that, "Gravity's Rainbow is not difficult, it is very accessible; just read one word after another, and when you are finished, you'll be surprised at how much you understand and how great a writer Pynchon is."
Bullpucky. Gravity's Rainbow is difficult in a very tedious way. It reminds me of autistic art, incredibly intricate but without much point to it. Pynchon, a great writer? There's no elegance to Pynchon's writing. If you want elegance, read Nabakov. Pynchon is the ultimate hack. He writes dirty, unwieldy, unmaintainable "code." You don't read Pynchon. You decipher him. And you can't do that by reading him one word after the other until you are done. Each sentence is a jumble of thoughts and concepts, and you're lucky if Pynchon provides enough punctuation and good grammar for you to absorb it in a single read-through. More often than not you have to make multiple passes to dissect the sentence, deconstructing and reassembling it so it makes sense to you.
Pynchon needlessly makes the reader do most of the heavy lifting. Often he does not identify characters until late in a scene. It's just "he" or "she" for page after page, then suddenly you learn it's Tyrone Slothrop or Prentice Pilot or Geli Trippling or some other absurdly named person. Nor does it help that many of the characters have aliases, and you think it's a new character for a few hundred pages only to discover that, no, it's that other character you knew about earlier.
He also goes far out of the way to remain eternally ambiguous. He holds way too much back; he doesn't want to be clear. There are points in the book where he ventures towards clarity, and you the reader start holding your breath, thinking, "Holy shit! He's going to get to the point for once!" And then comes the "grand ellipsis." That's what I call it. Here is an example excerpt:
"Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the Anubis, an honesty he can't avoid, can't shrug off ... finally, finally he has to face, literally with his own real face, the transparency, the real light of..."
Yep, that's the end of the paragraph, and the next paragraph is on an entirely different subject. He sensed he was getting too close to actually saying something clear, so he just stopped. The bastard! No, he's not a great writer. Intelligent? Profoundly so. Knowledgable? Encyclopedically so. Full of deep and meaningful insights? I believe he is. But he doesn't convey much of this in his writing -- because he's too busy playing intricate puzzle games.
I do like the whole Pynchon personae, the great writer who shies from the limelight, who doesn't accept awards, who is essentially invisible and unknown. And I find it amusing that he didn't get the Pulitzer Prize for Gravity's Rainbow because someone on the committee was just too offended by the copraphagic scene (amusing because, shouldn't the individual have been more offended by the scenes and theme of pederasty throughout?).
All in all, a brilliant man, and a monumental work, but I keep thinking Andy Warhol and Campbell's soup can art, and wondering if Pynchon was merely the first to be Pynchon-like, and that's his claim to fame and what sets him apart and above, rather than any superior skills as a writer.
Yes, I finished it. It only took me 37.5 years to finish.
Actually, I gave up on it in the mid-'70s on my first attempt to read it (soon after it came out). Amusingly, I talked my good friend Chuck into buying a copy as well and we took the journey together -- except that I abandoned it 150-200 pages in while Chuck plowed through all 900 pages. His peeved remark at the time was, "Gee, you talk me into reading it, and then you bail? How exactly does that work?"
But there didn't seem much point to finishing something I couldn't grok.
Still, Gravity's Rainbow has haunted me over those long years. Somehow Lady Cranefly and I ended up with a copy, which kept looking down on me from a high bookshelf. Also, I've always felt a bit guilty for bailing on Chuck. So finally I pulled it down and resolved to read it beginning to end.
It took many weeks and a lot of effort, but when all was read and done, Gravity's Rainbow proved to be a richly rewarding experience and well worth the effort.
Or so they will tell you on a lot of websites devoted to Pynchon, or specifically to Gravity's Rainbow. Let me clear the air on the prevailing lofty and totally crazy claim that, "Gravity's Rainbow is not difficult, it is very accessible; just read one word after another, and when you are finished, you'll be surprised at how much you understand and how great a writer Pynchon is."
Bullpucky. Gravity's Rainbow is difficult in a very tedious way. It reminds me of autistic art, incredibly intricate but without much point to it. Pynchon, a great writer? There's no elegance to Pynchon's writing. If you want elegance, read Nabakov. Pynchon is the ultimate hack. He writes dirty, unwieldy, unmaintainable "code." You don't read Pynchon. You decipher him. And you can't do that by reading him one word after the other until you are done. Each sentence is a jumble of thoughts and concepts, and you're lucky if Pynchon provides enough punctuation and good grammar for you to absorb it in a single read-through. More often than not you have to make multiple passes to dissect the sentence, deconstructing and reassembling it so it makes sense to you.
Pynchon needlessly makes the reader do most of the heavy lifting. Often he does not identify characters until late in a scene. It's just "he" or "she" for page after page, then suddenly you learn it's Tyrone Slothrop or Prentice Pilot or Geli Trippling or some other absurdly named person. Nor does it help that many of the characters have aliases, and you think it's a new character for a few hundred pages only to discover that, no, it's that other character you knew about earlier.
He also goes far out of the way to remain eternally ambiguous. He holds way too much back; he doesn't want to be clear. There are points in the book where he ventures towards clarity, and you the reader start holding your breath, thinking, "Holy shit! He's going to get to the point for once!" And then comes the "grand ellipsis." That's what I call it. Here is an example excerpt:
"Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the Anubis, an honesty he can't avoid, can't shrug off ... finally, finally he has to face, literally with his own real face, the transparency, the real light of..."
Yep, that's the end of the paragraph, and the next paragraph is on an entirely different subject. He sensed he was getting too close to actually saying something clear, so he just stopped. The bastard! No, he's not a great writer. Intelligent? Profoundly so. Knowledgable? Encyclopedically so. Full of deep and meaningful insights? I believe he is. But he doesn't convey much of this in his writing -- because he's too busy playing intricate puzzle games.
I do like the whole Pynchon personae, the great writer who shies from the limelight, who doesn't accept awards, who is essentially invisible and unknown. And I find it amusing that he didn't get the Pulitzer Prize for Gravity's Rainbow because someone on the committee was just too offended by the copraphagic scene (amusing because, shouldn't the individual have been more offended by the scenes and theme of pederasty throughout?).
All in all, a brilliant man, and a monumental work, but I keep thinking Andy Warhol and Campbell's soup can art, and wondering if Pynchon was merely the first to be Pynchon-like, and that's his claim to fame and what sets him apart and above, rather than any superior skills as a writer.