I fell asleep near just about every paragraph

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around

Peel back the mountains, peel back the stars

Stop gravity into the floor

It’s a memory kind of sky, let me show what I can do with it

Time and distance are out of place here

–R. E. M., “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” which wallflower still claims is about reading Gravity’s Rainbow. (The title is actually “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” PEOPLE!)

Avathoir: Well people this is it. This is the big one. Pynchon’s third novel, the 776 page doorstopper that, if it did not establish him as the big kahuna of his generation (the “Pretentious White Male Postmodernists” generation, which includes Coover, Elkin, DeLillo, McElroy, Barthleme, and several other people who are all worth your time but pretentious in the same way), single handedly guaranteed his immortality. I’d tried to read this book before, and to be honest I still think I failed it, in many ways: it’s dense with references, digressions, and experiments, to the degree that you can start reading one line and be utterly lost by the second half of the sentence.

I’ll be honest here: unlike with V, which I think was a book that would have been great and accessible if he cut half of it, and Crying of Lot 49, which I think is for the most part pretty easy to understand until at a certain point Pynchon sort of loses concentration and you get mixed up in it, this is the book where he abandons, though perhaps temporarily, the idea of actually understanding the plot. I don’t even think understanding the plot or the prose is even the point: this might be the first comedic WWII novel about a feeling, where the quality of an experience or what the experience is doesn’t matter as much as how it provokes an internal feeling. In that regard, this is one of the best books I have ever read, because even though I’m still not sure about exactly half of the things that happen over the course of these pages I have the gut feeling I know what happened, as if I lived through it, even if I didn’t understand it.



You got me into this mess wallflower, so take responsibility. Am I making sense with this take? What’s your reading of this brick of a book? How was your first readthrough of it in comparison to mine? What do you think Pynchon’s trying here?

wallflower: Pynchon almost aggressively doesn’t care about realistic plotting here. Right away, we start with a vision of Londoners evacuating during the Blitz and that shifts into the imagination of our first character, Pirate Prentice, in the winter of 1944–a fair warning for the rest of the book. Later, our main character (more or less), Tyrone Slothrop, gets caught up in an orgy in the middle of a chase scene, which, we’re told, “goes on for weeks,” and then escapes from a mad scientist’s lab between chapters. These are only the immediate examples; the entire damn thing is like this, and if you’re used to reading in terms of “what’s happening now? And what’s happening next?” it’s a constantly dislocating and exhausting experience. Lot 49 and V. both occasionally slid into the imagination of its author and characters, but here Pynchon goes all in and creates something that’s one long hallucination.

Pynchon lampshades the shit outta this, just in case you were wondering if it was by accident. Late in the novel he addresses us with the wonderful line “You will want cause and effect. All right” and also this little passage, which is so much of what Gravity’s Rainbow is about: wordplay, ontological contemplation, cartoon action, zany typography, and funny names:

“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 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–”

It’s “Who’s on First” meets Fight Club meets Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, all taking place in an Eric Ambler thriller why not. Pynchon drops so many other clues as to the hallucinatory nature of this world, right from the beginning with Prentice’s talent “for getting inside the fantasies of others” and then continuing with all sorts of drugs (real and fictional) taken by all sorts of characters (real and fictional), breaks in the story for impossible incidents, digressions on digressions on digressions. We rarely get through a paragraph of this book without some kind of shift of tone, genre, or level of probability, and it happens so often that it becomes not a violation of reality but its own kind of reality. It works because not only does Pynchon keep reminding us that this is a fiction we’re reading, the characters keep wondering it too, and with good cause.

Running along all of this is a sturdy commitment to realistic details, right down to the launch switch of the V-2 rocket and what’s playing on the radio for any given night. (Pynchon apparently raided a metric fuck-ton of back issues of the London Times to get all the details; this is courtesy, again, of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, 2nd ed. (!), which gives a line by-line and sometimes word-by-word list of references.) That Pynchon chose to write an encyclopedic hallucination with all this fidelity to fact puts this in the same class as Ulysses, and it points to something necessary: the way reality and unreality get mixed up here is an essential theme.

Most of Gravity’s Rainbow takes place between the end of 1944 and the late summer of 1945, from the rain of the V-2 bombs on England to not long after Hiroshima. Like Lot 49, this is set at a transformative historical moment, maybe the transformative historical moment for an American writer in the 1970s: the beginning of the Cold War. As we suggested last time out, Pynchon’s writing about a moment when an entire old order has collapsed and all sorts of potential new orders (including, possibly, the New Order) could come out of it. The longest section of the book, “In the Zone,” takes place mostly in immediate postwar Europe which Pynchon explicitly likens to Oz, and he portrays it as a place where anything can happen, based on the things that have actually happened.

That theme, of fantasy becoming reality and reality generating fantasy, goes all through the book. Rocket engineer Franz Pökler aggressively fucks his wife after seeing a torture scene in a movie and the child, Ilse, born from that comes back into his life, once a year while she’s being held prisoner–unless it’s not her. Later (but earlier in our reading), the actress in the film begs Slothrop to whip her and have sex with her. (We’re gonna get into just how awful the sexual politics are in this book.) The British PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender, “Whose surrender is not made clear”) creates a counterintelligence film about black Nazi rocket troops, and then they turn out to be real. Things shift all along the spectrum from verifiable, documented fact to completely crazy made-up shit, and it’s the point and power of this novel that it’s easier to do this than we ever thought. The most poignant example of this is Slothrop, who starts the novel as the protagonist and ends it as a rumor, as unreliable as anything else. What Pynchon has done here is to take the kind of paranoia Oedipa Maas went through in Lot 49 and make us feel it, right down to the level of words.

All this is a long way of saying, yeah, you got it right, or at least I agree with you. Since Gravity’s Rainbow is so unwelcoming on the level of plot, what kept you reading? What got you through the nearly 800 pages here?

Avathoir: Time for an autobiographical digression. I bought this book and a few others with me to a trip to Europe back at the end of July: my plan was to read this book and whenever I got bored/frustrated switch to something else. I read the first epigraph as I was taking off into the sky.

I never read anything else on the trip. If you’ve never read Gravity’s Rainbow this might sound incredibly surreal and like I’m bullshitting, but…this is a living object of a book. It consumes you, when you get past the first few pages. I didn’t read anything else because I didn’t want to, it was as if the book was mocking me. “What, you gonna read ANGELA CARTER or something while I’m here? Oh you little coward. Come over here and take your subjugation like a good little weakling that you are.” and back I would go. I didn’t really because I wanted to, but as almost as if it had hypnotized me into picking it up and plowing through, over and over no matter how little “fun” I was having, and I’ll be honest: this is not a fun book (except when it’s hilarious) but we already knew that, so let’s talk about other stuff.

More specifically, I want to talk about how I sort of see this book being written, when I would just see these endless lines of tiny type and just groan at how much there was. Unlike V. or even Lot 49 and the Slow Learner stories, this for me didn’t really stand out as much prose wise. I’m not saying that the prose is bad, but merely judging it by poetic language standards of previous books is useless. Its designed to keep you off your guard, not impress you.

Likewise, you mention plot. This seems to me to be a book that has a very simple premise in some ways in regards to how it was written: simply do not leave anything out. It is as if Pynchon decided after sitting down one day and writing down every single idea he had for this book to use every single thing, not waste one word or character or idea or whatever. In that regard I think he succeeds brilliantly. It feels like it’s a book about everything and it can be about anything at any given moment.



Which might explain the sex in this book. There’s a lot of it, and almost all of it is disgusting. There’s the pedophilia. The diarrhea eating. The bestiality. Not to mention one of the final acts of the book is to take an abused boy and basically make him have sex with a rocket as it flies, upon which it will detonate and instantly kill him. There’s so much stuff in here that I just found so repellant I felt like this “Everything everything” approach backfired. I don’t think Pynchon finds this stuff sexy but…it has to be there for a reason, right?



wallflower: I didn’t really get what Gravity’s Rainbow was until years after I read it, in fact until years after I reread it. (One more way in which you’re right, this is one of those works that’s a living thing, and your relationship changes with it as you age.) When I finally got around to reading Moby-Dick, I almost immediately thought “mmm. Strong the Pynchon influence with this one is.” (Why yes, I have an internal voice that sounds like Yoda. Doesn’t everyone?) Now, that may have some problems with, y’know, temporal causality and all, but art does that kind of thing all the time. What connects Pynchon and Melville is exactly what you caught, that desire, that compulsion really, to talk about everything and in every style, and The Rocket-Man: His Masquerade would be a great alternate title for GR. (Alan Moore has got this vibe too and he’s explicitly cited GR as an influence on Watchmen.)

This kind of compulsion only works in novels, where plot isn’t the most important thing, and digressions can be about building a universe rather than avoiding moving forward. (I knew Moby-Dick was gonna be great when we got a whole chapter about chowder. Corn and clam.) And my God, what digressions. I like the prose more than you did, or at least I like some of the prose more than you did. The Disgusting English Candy Drill, the variations on the phrase “you never did the Kenosha Kid” (I had a week way back when where I was yelling “you never did ‘the,’ Kenosha Kid!” at every opportunity), the story of Franz Pökler, especially as he discovers “the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring,” and most of all the meditations on the meanings of science, especially about calculus and the Δt. I’ve always remembered Mondaugen’s Law–”personal density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth”–and it’s formed the basis of a lot of my thinking; New Modes for Old Truths owes a lot to it.

Thing is, when you write about everything, it becomes much clearer what you’re not writing about, and in Gravity’s Rainbow there’s no conception of females, ages 12 and up, having any reason to exist except for men to fuck. (Maybe I can give an exception for Katje, who exists to have sex with Slothrop and be sad, and also Leni Pökler, who has sex with her husband, gives birth to Ilse, gives Slothrop a massage, and is sad.) If it happens once, it’s shocking and can make a point; it can also tell us something about a particular character. When all the women are like this, it’s a really disturbing failure of the imagination, especially when the last thing Pynchon seems to suffer from is a lack of imagination about anything else. (See also: American Psycho and Aaron Sorkin.) In a fascinating little book called Writing Pynchon, authors Alec McHoul and David Wills deflated a lot of the interpretations about Gravity’s Rainbow by noting that an obvious one is “Slothrop wants to get laid for free.” It’s what places Pynchon right in David Foster Wallace’s Great Male Narcissist tradition, and also right in a lot of the countercultural tradition: freedom is the highest virtue, and said freedom is for men to have sex with whoever they want. All I can add to this is that he got past it, even if it took seventeen years of near-silence.

If Gravity’s Rainbow is a mess in terms of plot, it’s actually structured quite tightly; more than anything else, this is what I caught on my most recent reading. We start the book with a rocket launch in 1944, and it ends with another rocket (the 00000?) landing in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Prentice dreams of “the Adenoid” at the beginning and we meet the adenoidal Richard M. Nixon Zhlubb at the end. Names appear in epigraphs and show up as characters later. Stories that are real in one part become hallucinations in another. Most effectively, part four (“The Counterforce”) tracks the disappearance of Slothrop, as he gets mentioned less and less and every time, he’s more off to the side until we get lines like “it’s doubtful he can ever be found again, in the sense of ‘positively identified and detained.’”* It’s something quite touching and I’ve never seen another author pull it off.

Slothrop’s story does form the core of Gravity’s Rainbow; a bit like Wallace’s Infinite Jest, there’s a large plot that’s happening somewhere else, and we only see it in glimpses, like the characters. His story–used in psychological experiments as a baby, possibly the property of or under surveillance by the German chemical company IG Farben, sensing or causing V-2 rockets to fall with his erections, and let loose in postwar Europe to be present at “possibly, heavily paranoid voices whisper, his time’s assembly”–points to what has given GR its reputation. Pynchon has touched on this before in everything he’s written, but here he confronts it: to what extent are we made, right down to our desires, by forces larger than ourselves? We’ve talked about plot and incident and a little about style, but here I want to get into these questions: what do you think GR is about? What does it say to you?

Avathoir: I’m not quite sure if this is going to make any sense, but if I had to say what a book like this, which is seemingly everything, it is a book about what is not and why what is not is not. The book in this regard is an examination of reality through the negative, through the idea that some things exist but most things do not: so why don’t they exist? In a book where it seems to have a big defining symbol or scene that would be what a normal novel bases itself off of on every page, this is especially odd.

Pynchon offers a lot of potential answers to this idea: people are not because some people are there and some people are not. Think of the potential family that could have resulted from Roger Mexico and Jessica, which as we see in some of my favorite part of the book at the end of part 1, slips away more and more, starting out as a flame in Jessica and then in Roger, which burns away more and more as the war begins to end, until he realizes that their love was only temporary, because their love was there because Jessica’s husband was not, and as long as he was not the love was there, but when he was there and the war was not the love was there, but now the war and the husband are there and the love is not. People die all the time in this book, and Slothrop becomes so not there that he seems to be glitching out of reality (which is what these descriptions really remind me of. Pynchon probably predicted glitches). Eventually, the power of not becomes so overwhelming that the 00000 Rocket is launched, powered by a love that was not and motivated because a man’s ideal of Nazi Germany was no longer there and instead was not, and the refusal of what is was so powerful that it literally obliterates the story. My own edition comes with two blank pages at the end of it: I suspect that Pynchon is telling us they intend to be filled with words.



So I suppose that if we talk about freedom (which includes horrifying sex) I suppose it’s a further commentary of Pynchon of the nature of reality. Most of these sex scenes are surreal and horrific in equal measure, and I cannot deny that sometimes I asked myself “is this really happening? He can’t really be writing this, can he?” and I began to wonder if that was part of the theme, that he’s writing these sex scenes (if you can call them “scenes”, they’re about as erotic as a routine checkup and they’re not exactly lengthy), explicitly because they are not happening. Even so, I think they register as contempt for women regardless, since pretty much nobody without a Y chromosome has any depth.



So I’ve given you my theory to what this book is about. I’ll ask you a question in turn, and we may end up neglecting the book itself to actually talk about this: how exactly does this book exist? There’s almost no chance a book like this could actually get published at a major press, nevertheless nearly nab the Pulitzer and at the very least the National Book Award. It’s an incredibly long nigh incomprehensible book about all the things that don’t exist and all the things that do. How does someone even write a book that could be mistaken for an universe? How did Pynchon pull this out of his hat and seemingly never do anything like this again?

wallflower: First, I’m glad you mentioned Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico (two more of Pynchon’s most perfect names, and I always wonder if Jessica in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was an homage to her), because they really do land as characters. “They are in love. Fuck the War.” Jessica comes off as genuinely torn between what she has and what Roger offers, and Pynchon’s smart enough to realize that Roger comes with his own baggage and how difficult it is for her to negotiate that. As for Roger, he’s completely convincing and moving as a nerd in love for the first time (shut up, you’re the one who’s recognizing himself in Roger), dealing with emotions that he has no idea how to handle and can barely comprehend. They’re both so moving; in some ways, Roger works better as a protagonist than Slothrop. By novel’s end, he’ll have lost Jessica but will be using his math skillz in the Counterforce to track down the 00000; in his final scene, he and Pynchon favorite Pig Bodine pull off a daring escape using nothing but alliteration and disgust.

Now, let’s hack away at that not. (Referential pun. BOOM!) In his introduction to the Centennial Edition of 1984, Pynchon wrote that “the novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.” It’s a truism that 1984 was Orwell warning us what could happen If Certain Trends Continue; maybe Gravity’s Rainbow is like that, but like the sound of the V-2, the sequence is reversed. It’s a historical novel where Pynchon rewrote the past to contain the seeds of the present, sprouting in the Zone. He saw what it would all lead to, thirty years later, and he warned us by looking backwards rather than forwards. This is one way to see your not: no, this didn’t happen but it might have been happening, and Pynchon, like Geli Tripping (GET IT?), casts a spell to see if he can stop it after the fact. It’s homeopathy: maybe if we speak all the madness out loud, we can stop Rocket 00000 from falling on Los Angeles. Maybe, like the Schwarzkommando, there’s no way to make something unreal after you’ve made it real, “no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward,” but Gravity’s Rainbow is Pynchon’s backwards incantation of history.

Another way to look at that not is to take Roger’s path. This goes back (and forward) to “Under the Rose” (and the Slow Learner introduction) and Pynchon’s question in writing it: “is history personal or statistical?” So much of literature, and so much of politics, depends on thinking it’s personal. In the words of a certain someone just way too naive for Pynchon, “we choose, and our choices make the world. . .we matter and that we have to live in the world that we make.” Right away in Gravity’s Rainbow, we don’t. Our choices are not our own, and even if they are, it’s not going to matter. Pynchon shows us what the world looks like when it’s truly statistical, as Roger reminds us that his map of the bombs falling on London can’t make anyone safer: “Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.” Gravity’s Rainbow takes place not so much in the realm of not as in “the domain between zero and one” of probability, as Oberst Enzian of the Schwarzkommando explains:

“Well, I think we’re here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain–it knows it’s here, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being here right now are only a little better than even–the slightest shift in the probabilities and we’re gone–schnapp! like that.” “Peculiar talk, Oberst.” “Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God theory. . . .”

(The story of the Südwest–German South-West Africa and the Herero genocide–and several of its characters come back from V. into GR.) What makes Gravity’s Rainbow so strange and so overstuffed is that its reality is not a single thing; this is what statistical-not-personal looks like. Move towards the One of probability and you get the facts and dates that he manages so carefully; move towards the Zero and you get the fictions of the Schwarzkommando and Slothrop’s Trainspottingesque dive into the toilet and the Casino Hermann Goering. He dares his characters, and us, to tell them all apart.

As to why he never did anything like this again, well, if he’s just gonna stay quiet and not give interviews, it’s up to us to irresponsibly speculate. After this, there would be a lot of madness and fantasy in his novels but the central narrative would never be in question the way it was here. (Against the Day deals with the same idea of a fiction existing in the real world in a way that’s elegant and simple as compared to the VitaMix of Gravity’s Rainbow.) Looking back on this from his late career, I can see three distinct periods, and each one ends with the THUD of a mighty novel landing. Gravity’s Rainbow ends the first period, Against the Day the second, with the shorter, tighter, but not less major novels Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge following that. I’m gonna go, as I usually do, to the simplest explanation: with GR and AtD, he came to the end of what he wanted to say, or at least what he wanted to say in that way. It may have taken him fifteen or so years to realize that he would never write another Gravity’s Rainbow; of course, he may also have just kicked back and lived off the profits too. He did, after all, name his major character Slothrop, and write an essay on sloth for the New York Times Book Review’s “Seven Deadly Sins” series.

Back to you: if someone was just starting this novel, what would you tell them? What would you say to them as they were reading? How would you pitch this, or to put it almost another way, what should I have told you?

Avathoir: I would say that if you’re going to read this don’t expect it to make any sense. Just go along with Pynchon’s way of doing things. You’re not going to be able to play on any terms but his own, so just head along for the ride. If you do the book will reward you, and if you don’t, well…there’s a reason the Pulitzer Board refuse to give it the Fiction Prize all those years ago. But who cares what they think?

wallflower: Indeed, if they were thinking that they’d make the book less notorious that way, it totally backfired, giving it one more way to embed itself in the American literary canon. I’ll add to anyone reading this for the first time: novels can be comprehensive or elegant, not both, and Pynchon went all in on the former.

By way of conclusion, one of the reasons Gravity’s Rainbow matters is that it’s had an influence that’s still going on. Partly it’s an influence on American literature; there had been many attempts to do the things Pynchon does here: the sliding between perspectives, the language that goes from high art to gutter colloquy, the lists upon lists upon lists, the genrebending, the rendering of what Fredric Jameson called “the political unconscious,” the incorporation of science, but no one did all of that and no one worked on the sheer scale that Pynchon did. Gravity’s Rainbow has the same place in the American literary tradition that Buffy and The Sopranos have in the Second Golden Age of Television: it’s a proof-of-concept, a way of showing that you could do all this stuff and it could work. Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Alex Ross Perry (whose first film Impolex plays somewhere between homage to and adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow), and a lot of other creators who use less than three names owe something to this book. That’s one more reason Pynchon never did anything like this again: like Ulysses, he left it to others to write the sequel.

By now, no one will surprised to know that it’s had a strong influence on me too. Except for David Mamet and maybe Joseph Conrad, there’s no other author who has gotten into my prose style the way he has. (I don’t consciously write “sez” all the time, nor do I consciously slide between different kinds of language. Style, again, is the thing you can’t help doing, and that may be more true in language than any other medium.) I also read it not long before I ran into Bruno Latour (who cameos in last week’s essay) and his argument that there’s a spectrum between real and unreal, and, as we’ve said, Gravity’s Rainbow takes place in that space. (Latour’s rise to academic prominence coincides with Pynchon’s years of near-silence between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. For that and another Vineland-related reason, I told Latour I was on to him and knew he was actually Pynchon. He never denied, or possibly understood, this.)

That’s another influence he’s had on me, and maybe the most important. Pynchon rigorously (so strange to use that word here, but it’s true) shows us the realization of his ideas: it’s easy to talk about that spectrum, it’s easy to say we live in a world where all our actions and feelings are mediated by systems, but he commits and shows us what the world would be like. That kind of commitment has always stuck with me, and I suppose it’s what I look for in art. And, once again, that may be why there’s nothing like this before or since in his writing: he decided, maybe around the time he wrote the introduction to Slow Learner, that he didn’t believe in this vision anymore.

Finally, I think that’s the importance of Gravity’s Rainbow. “. . .as if there’s a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file in the War Department.” Orwell talked about this, because of course he did: the dislocations and authoritarians of the twentieth century challenged the very bases of Western thought just as much as, say, the explorations of the sixteenth century challenged medieval thought. We need affirmations of our humanity, like The Shield; we also need visions where that humanism runs into the limits of the contemporary world. Like James Ellroy’s novels, Gravity’s Rainbow renders a world that doesn’t operate by goodness or reason. It’s crazy, violent, hallucinatory, overblown, and in some places just plain evil. It’s probably right.

*My idea for a film adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow would be to set it in the 1970s, as a member of the Counterforce tries to track down what happened to Slothrop and Rocket 00000, kind of like how Don deLillo structured Libra. Kind of wish Tony Scott could have stuck around for this one.

(Header image from Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is exactly what it sez.)