Review: Gravity's Rainbow

Once upon a time, 12 or 13 year old pretentious me wanted to read one of the most difficult books, entirely for the sake of reading one of the most difficult books. I popped open a browser, visited some random forums, and compiled a list of recommendations, long lost to e-waste. I ended up settling on Gravity's Rainbow, and requested it for Christmas from my parents. I received the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, replete with beautiful cover art, french flaps, deckle-edged paper, and nearly 800 dense, chunky pages. The actual sequence of events is up for debate, but I imagine I hastily unwrapped it, settled down into a plush sofa, opened the front page, smelling that new book smell, was seduced by the surprisingly lucid first section of the book, and was then slammed by a wall of paranoia, tangents, metaphysics, and insane ramblings. I made it about a quarter of the way in before it was left to collect dust.

A few years later, I made a second attempt, a foul tarnished emboldened by the flame of ambition. It was a laudable attempt, but metaphorical Margit turned it to wet ash about half-way through, just past the yacht orgy.

There were probably a couple more half-hearted attempts here and there over the next decade, but eventually, Gravity's Rainbow fell by the wayside, buried on a sagging bookshelf behind dozens of its kin, left in another house, another province, another country.

Until now. I can't say my latest pass was an attempt at revenge or redemption. I remember genuinely loving some sections of the book, and I had always been moderately curious just what in the heck was going on. I suppose there was also a little bit of curiousity as to whether my reading habits had changed sufficiently, if not to understand the more insane and opaque segments, then at the very least to survive them and continue onwards.

It took far too long, but I finally did it, made it through to the end. Was it worth the decade-long quest? I think so.

Gravity's Rainbow, when at its worst, is a vomit-torrent of scat porn, paedophilia, elephant vulvas, and incoherent rambling. When at its best (which is mercifully much more often), it is a beautifully crushing depiction of wartime and post-war europe, the hopelessness, lawlessness, destruction, desolation, decay, | || || |_, bomb-blasted churches in frigid winter air, banana sanctuary, rebirth, struggles for power, for meaning, for avoiding Them, the shattering of a man, paranoia, flight, descent into insanity, sentient lightbulbs, drunk monkeys, fear of pastries, and of course, incoherent rambling. Somewhere in the middle are the endless erections, breasts, and semen.

To be honest, there's a good chunk of the book I don't understand; references that are lost to time or academic study, or density and topic shifts that left me in a daze with a thousand yard stare and a brain trying to work backwards to some form of sanity without a full reboot. Pynchon is often unwilling to keep on one topic, from one perspective, for too long, as if in some kind of bizarre version of Speed where the book will explode if the topic or character settles for more than thirty seconds. It's a very hard style to emulate, but I've done my best below (in the time my Tik-Tok era attention span has bequeathed me).

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The soldier swung the truncheon down, YAAAAAGH, a lithe bomb locked onto the milky nape of the man's neck, short hairs in need of trimming goose-pimpled in premonitional fear, but drunken stupor and blurry double-vision defies rigorously programmed circuitry, and instead catches the edge of the table, solid oak kissing violently with a solid thwack. His phallic weapon is mute though, it has experienced much worse, back in the Olympics, a little sapling far from the loving shade of its parents, soaking up sunbeams shivering in a wooden orgasm, stoic at night, soft moonlight percolating through cumulonimbus, bearing their prophesies with a giggle "oh yes, you'll be soaked soon enough my pretties", nothing but a tease, continuing out east to ugh, those pretentious evergreens nestled in the cool shadows of motherly mountains, steady sentinels watching stoically over millenia, occasionally shifting their collosal weight to sent torrents of boulders down their sloves, AAAIIIII run for cover! But there is no escape, not for those corniforous bastards, nor for a little sapling by the coast, watching, frozen in terror, inept, flaccid in the face of forresters come to rip apart its neighbors, bring low their upthrust offerings to god and rocket alike, heresy, obscenity. No, instead it must sit, wait, becoming more swollen and resilient with every decay of its extremities and thaw of hoarfrost, until greedy eyes turn to it, lick caterpillar lips, and attack in a frenzy, wood chips, pieces of my body that will be given up to you flying, clinging to Levi denim and sweating skin, coating the soft hummus, a yet-living corpse torn violently apart, before a great crack and terminal arc traced through the air; if a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there, does it really... yes yes, we've all heard this a dozen times, it is hardly an interesting question. Better still, if a forest falls and the killers are there, does anyone care? Is there any redemption, rebellion, tree or man, to redeem him?

Does the soul leave its termite-ridden, weather worn, ring-around-the-posey-vessel immediately, ascending to tree heaving to be reunited with long lost tree mother and tree father, to dig deep into the fertile soil in The Sky and drink deep from His rays, or live on in its mangled offspring, cursed to immortality until every last shaving, every last particle, is gone and decayed with the heat-death of the universe? How much of us is needed to be us?

Of course, the sapling knows, living on, bumped around a poison-coughing lorry long past expiry, chopped, bleeding extant lifeblood to coat sticky the iron and steel machinations of dreaded mankind, reform, transmuted, Theseus' truncheon, carved by a man who was Christened in violence and shame with the name Stickle by a group of especially cruel adolescents out in rural Washington,

Oh, if a tree falls, then does it scream?

If it shatters, can we not still make a beam?

Collect the scraps, with e-po-xy too.

Back together, to surround the loo.

BWUUUUUUUUUH

Brass enters pompous and farting, violins and chello fight for dominance in the quickly destabilizing production, conductor sweating heavily now and arm moving at a prodigious, rate, just about to fall off hold on old chap you've got this, just have to get those damn whoop there goes the old masturbation engine, good thing he as another he he, flying a beautiful arc before falling back into the crowd, into the lap of an especially drugged out young dame, who merely giggles, so far gone this is all part of the production, quite interactive yes yes. Eventually, a raiding party from the strings manages to bludgeon the trumpets and trombones back into submission, percussion here getting involved there's the drummer off the top shelf watchoutwatchoutwatchout, brass now nursing their wounds, playing a sullen mezzo piano, tubing pockmarked with bombshell craters here and there, not quite on pitch. The strings are no better off, cords missing, priceless Stradivarius bent and ripped by sudden violence, the entire musical apparatus across the globe crying out and thrashing on the ground in dispair, the empiricalists standing smug above the pissing and dying blobs, "well, now they'll just have to use identical-sounding violins, won't they". The show must go on, and they make it through to its proud and slightly mostly off-key climax, the crowd in standing ovation, half out of respect, other half edging towards the exists to leave as quickly as possible as mean looks are exchanged across the stage, and instruments are brandished. The doors close, and false-chord screaming and ACME BONKS are heard on the other side.

The grudge between brass and strings lives on in the now mature and thoroughly disfigured sapling, a tendency for violence suitable for its new role, taking great pleasure in every cracked bone and yelp in contact with soft skin, most disappointed in it boozed-out wielder, making its disgust known by ricocheting off what it now recognizes as an old friend "Hey Woody, what're you doing so far from home?" "Hi Sappy, I was turned into a table." "Ah, what a life that must be." "No, not at all, it's all dregs, stinking vomit, smelly armpits and broken glass" "Well that's unfortunate. Look, I'd love to stay and chat, but unfortunately I have a pre-arranged appointment with the forehead of The Hand That Holds Me AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" thunk, the soldier is out cold, and the man scrambles for grip on the alcohol-lubricated floor, hey, is this also oak? before finding his footing and slipping away out the back.

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A poor attempt, but one that I hope transmits the absolute batshit insanity that launches itself at you every once and a while, keeping you on your toes. While my attempt was fairly circular, ending about where it started, often times these seemingly tangential streams end up following another character in the story, somewhere else entirely, or tie two together. It is therefore not possible to ignore them entirely, as they are often relevant to the plot (or just plain entertaining). I've read that the first pass of Gravity's Rainbow is just to survive, and the second is to begin to understand it. I can believe it; I think I finally grasped all the plot points this time around, but I feel like I'd benefit from a second pass to catch all the connections and references (one of my favorite finds this read is when Katje calls Slothrop a pig early on, a most subtle Chekov's gag tactical nuke (with free suppressor!)). Heck, I might have to find a companion guide to help decode the litany of references and babblings.

A change in pace, because everything is blurry now after writing that brain-drainer of a passage and I can't think of a smooth transition: Gravity's Rainbow is downright hilarious when it wants to be; the kreplach kid, Raoul's party, Frau Gnahb vs. chimp with banana, escape from Major Marvy, dockside shinanigans at Peenemünde, Mexico hunting, and so much more.

Gravity's Rainbow is also downright beautiful and evocative when it wants to be; I've collected a small set of non-spoiler passages below, but honestly, the first page of the book was compelling enough for me to pick it up and keep going. I must add, a lot of my favorite passages are from early on in the book, before I was collecting snippets; you'll just have to read it to find them for yourself.

"But come with us," the girls are calling above the waves, two of them holding up an enormous wicker basket out of which lean sleek green wine bottles and rough-crusted loaves still from under their white cloth steaming in little wisps feathering off of chestnut glazes and paler split-streaks, "come sur la plage . . ."

Behind her steps the carpet relaxes ceilingward, sole and heel-shapes disappearing visibly slow out of the wool pile. A single rocket explosion comes thudding across the city, from far east of here, east by southeast. The light along her shoes flows and checks like afternoon traffic.

Overhead, black birds with yellow beaks lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from their nests up in the mountain castles and down in the city ruins. Far away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is idling all its engines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where moss creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor sound so that it seems to come in from all directions.

A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky. Little kids come skidding to a halt, and the brass band fall silent in mid-bar.

They come out into the last of the twilight. Just a sleepy summer evening in Peenemünde. A flight of ducks passes overhead, going west. No Russians around. A single bulb burns over the entrance to the cargo shed. Otto and his girl wander hand in hand along the dock. An ape comes scampering up to take Otto's free hand. To north and south the Baltic keeps unrolling low white waves.

"Felix," the clarinet player asks the tuba player, "what have we fallen among?" Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment. Presently he has wandered off in the woods with the rest of the band, where they can be heard moving around in circles, tootling and blatting at each other.

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them. Up on the rooftops the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upside down and looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love. Rabbits come scurrying at night to eat whatever's good in the yards.

Minor spoilers, but gosh I love dumb stuff like this:

About halfway up Springer blows a tremendous fart that echoes for minutes across the historic ellipse, like now to do for you folks my anal impression of the A4. .. . "Oh, fuck you," Slothrop snarls. "An erect green steed of planetoid and bone," nods the Springer in reply Music and chatter back by the Assembly Building have all died away now, and an unpleasant calm has replaced them. Up over the top at last and into the woods, where Springer rests his forehead against a tree trunk and commences vomiting violently.

What? - Richard M. Nixon

"l-say," offers Rózsavölgyi from a far corner: the one corner of the room, by the way, which is not brightly lit, yes kind of an optic anomaly here, just a straight, square room, no odd-shaped polyhedrons in Twelfth House . . . and still, this strange, unaccountable prism of shadow in the corner . . . more than one visitor has popped in to find Mr. Pointsman not at his desk where he ought to be but standing in the shadow-corner—most disturbingly facing into it. . . . Rózsavölgyi is not himself that fond of the Corner, he's tried it a few times but only came out shaking his head: "Mis-ter Pointsman, I-don't like it in there, at all. What poss-ible kind, of a thrill can an-yone get, from such an un-wholesomeexperience. Eh?" raising one crookedly wistful eyebrow. Pointsman had only looked apologetic, not for himself but to something for Rózsavölgyi, and said gently, "This is one spot in the room where I feel alive," well bet your ass one or two memos went up toward Ministerial level over that one. If they reached the Minister himself, it was probably as office entertainment. "Oh yes, yes," shaking his wise old head of sheep's wool, high, almost Slavic cheekbones crinkling his eyes up into an inattentive but polite laughter, "yes Pointsman's famous Corner, yes . . . wouldn't be surprised if it was haunted, eh?" Reflex laughs from the underlings present, though only grim smiles from the overlings. "Get the S.P.R. in, to have a look," giggles someone with a cigar. "The poor bloke will think he's back in the War again." "Hear, hear," and, "That's a good one, all right," ring through the layering smoke. Practical jokes are all the rage among these particular underlings, a kind of class tradition. "You say what," Roger has been screaming for a while. "I-say," sez Rózsavölgyi, again. "You say, 'I say'? Is that it? Then you should have said, 'I say, "I say." ' " "I did." "No, no—you said, 'I say,' once, is what you—" "A-ha! But I said it again. I-said it... twice." "But that was after I asked you the question—you can't tell me the two 'I say's were both part of the same statement," unless, "that's asking me to be unreasonably," unless it's really true that, "credulous, and around you that's a form of," that we're the same person, and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that means, "insanity, Rózsavölgyi—"

Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present.

Gravity's Rainbow is a book filled with lunacy, degeneracy, beauty, and monumental scope and ambition. When I read a book I gel well with, I'll typically find myself daydreaming about its events, or trying to live in its world a little bit longer afterwards in a fantastic haze or drowsy snuggled-up stupor. With Gravity's Rainbow, I found that after an especially compelling segment, I wouldn't be fantasizing the events of the book, but rather sentences, streams of nonsense narrating my actions and the world around me. It's unique, it's weird, and in my opinion, it's worth reading if you are willing to slam your head into its neutron-start-dense literary wall and follow the tenuous and deranged threads of thought and events.