Well, yesterday was April Fool's Day...I did not get fooled. Or maybe I was. Perhaps there was some sort of meta-foolery going on, which I won't see until years later, and suddenly I'll wake up with a strange light in my eyes, the dawn of a new understanding of what They'd done, with profound regret and a sense of loss at the dialectic of my personal history, vis-a-vis the V2 Rocket.
As you might have guessed, I just finished up Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and my brain is still recovering from the massive effort.
It took me a month to read the damn thing. I've read Russian novels in less time. I actually picked it up more on a personal dare than anything else; Gravity's Rainbow is considered the Quintessential Postmodern Novel (at least by Wikipedia). It's one of the "Big Three" of modern literature/college Lit courses, the other two being Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Ulysses by James Joyce. Being a bit of a lit git, I admit, I picked it up and read a bit. And then a bit more. And a bit more. By the end it was a competition to see if I could finish the thing, because brother, is Gravity's Rainbow DENSE.
I think of books the same way I think of meals: Stephen King novels are big, but easily consumed, like a large supreme pizza; Dostoevsky is like an exotic barbecue, complete with dessert. What was GR likes? Well, I once had a particularly bad meal at the Pegasus in Greektown, Detroit, in which the "sample" plate consisted of three massive casserole squares, one of which was allegedly Moussaka. I'm not particularly sure why I kept eating them - maybe it was another dare. They were heavy in the mouth, difficult to chew, impossible to swallow, and sat in the stomach like three pounds of wet pulp. Add that to the so-so calimari, uzo and beer, plus the unseasonably warm weather, and I was a bit nauseous on the walk afterward. This, in a nutshell, was my reaction to Gravity's Rainbow.
The plot: V2 rockets are falling on London. A group of paranormal researchers and psychologists are trying to predict where they'll fall next, but everything seems random. At some point they fixate upon an American named Tyrone Slothrop, who may (or may not) have the ability to "attract" rockets. At some point Slothrop is unwittingly sent on a secret mission through Wartime, and later, Occupation Germany, to locate a mysterious rocket designated "00000" and a device called the Schwarzgerät ("Black Device"). Along the way he meets a series of lovers, dope fiends, revolutionaries, and a secret tribe of Africans from a German colony, who all have their own designs on the V2. Hijinks ensue. Weird details of history are explored at length, transgressive sex is had, philosophical concepts are extrapolated, some Paranoia is felt, and song-and-dance routines are performed.
My biggest problem with it is my problem with most postmodern literature: the extreme aversion to just telling the goddamn story already. Pynchon is always messing with you in terribly clever way, and it's up to you, the Befuddled Reader, to try to figure out what the hell is going on. At best you feel rather delighted and clever yourself; at worst, you're left hanging in the middle of a particularly interesting scene, never to find out the punchline, when Pynchon gets bored and wanders off somewhere else. For the first quarter of the book it was intriguing, and I certainly liked his prose better than I did Kurt Vonnegut's; the middle section even settles down to tell a (relatively) coherent story.
But the last half of the novel was a slog. You could feel the strain on the buckles of TP's narrative ability as he tried desperately to wrap things up, like stuffing too many unfolded clothes in one suitcase. That's the problem with a lot of "clever" novels (I'm thinking pointedly of Tom Robbins here): their little quirks and winks and jiggery-pokery are all right for a while, but it quickly becomes apparent that that's all they've got. You've seen five or six ironic chorus lines, and you've seen them all, regardless of how terribly terribly clever TP's lyrics are [supposed to be]. And the flights of consciousness (they're more than "streams" of consciousness, let me tell you) just feel tacked on, as though TP said, "Aw geez, I did this before, and now they expect it, better jam a few more in here." As far as I see it, a maximalist technique such as Pynchon's would be great at the beginning, as a hook to drag the reader into the narrative, but at some point it has to give in to the narrative.
Quick Aside: I know what you're thinking here. Comic book writing is all narrative, point A to point B to point C, stripped-down, industrial, no-frills. So my critique is a bit skewed to begin with. How could I appreciate Postmodern literature, when its whole purpose was to deconstruct industrial narrative storytelling? To play with the technique of writing, and mess with the audience? My answer is that I do appreciate their deconstructive techniques; comics can also perform this task, perhaps even more effectively than literature, due to their complex interplay of text, pictures, and layout. Deconstruction per se is not my issue. My problem is the way it's so often used, like a man farting the Pledge of Allegiance: it's shocking, it's delighting, it gets lotsa laffs, but eventually the audience's attention is going to wander, even as the Farter is still desperately breaking wind. In terms of abusing the technique, Gravity's Rainbow is one of the best of the lot, since Pynchon is actually thoughtful about it and weaves a complex narrative to complement it, but in the end he's still just farting onstage. The Technique has betrayed the Narrative.
There are moments of brilliance. The world of the novel is vast. Pynchon surprises you with little details, like names half-mentioned in the beginning of the book who show up in the last quarter as whole characters. The whole book fits together less like a puzzle than a tangled nest of roots. I was fascinated by all the odd WWII factoids (Black German colonial soldiers? Is that true?) and want to research more. Pathos, when it occurs, is always shocking and gut-wrenching. Remember the scene from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 when Yossarian is yelling at the low-flying B17, just before it cuts a man in half? That sort of pitiable, helpless horror happens several times in Gravity's Rainbow.
Be warned, ye of gentle stomachs and pure minds: there is a lot of transgressive sex. Prostitution, orgies, S&M, pedophilia, urolagnia, coprophagy (that particular passage cost GR the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)...pretty much everything except necrophilia and bestiality, and the latter was seriously considered for a couple of sentences. There's drugs, too, of course, of every kind you can think of, plus a few more. The novel furnishes WWII with an underground of sex and drugs which few of us really consider, but which was - especially among the Nazis, and Hitler in particular - completely true. The idea that the "Greatest Generation" was much different from ourselves is mostly hogwash...they just didn't talk about it as much. What happened in Europe stayed in Europe.
Unfortunately, the brilliant bits aren't enough to save this gigantic portion of Moussaka. So I heave myself up from the table, belly hanging, and waddle over to a nice, easily-digestible Stephen King novel, to cleanse the palate.
I give Gravity's Rainbow an exasperated Two "Meh's" Up for being terribly clever but ultimately a boring slog. Like Bob Dylan for music, you don't have to like it, but you at least have to appreciate its importance to (post)modern literature - if only from a distance.
Rick Out.
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