I step beyond the zero and begin my descent into the postmodern madness of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece.

Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those books that’s been on my shelf for ages, waiting patiently for me to finally muster enough willpower (or shame) to take the plunge. And so here we are, having cracked the spine, followed the rainbow, and wormed roughly 200 pages into this literary riot. How’s it so far? In a word: absurd.

Reading Pynchon is an exercise in mental endurance. Gravity’s Rainbow, in particular, has a reputation for being long, confusing and pretentious, and I’m not willing to defend it against any of those assertions at the moment, just after part one. It’s all of those things, seemingly.

The way to read it is to embrace the fact that you’ll be knackered at the end of each section (there aren’t numbered chapters, just line breaks), and often re-reading mystifying passages to parse out what the hell actually happened.

Did a giant cancerous adenoid gland really take out part of London like The Blob? Did Slothrop just dive into a toilet bowl and blink dingleberries out of his eyelashes? Are there dozens of pages about an underage sexual misadventure? Yes, dear reader, yes there are.

Though, of course, these are probably fictions and fantasies of the characters’ addled minds, be it under the influence of drugs, psychological experimentation or possession by spirits. I think…

After adjusting yourself to the verbose, shotgun prose — where so much absurdity and syntactical noise happens in each sentence, without much “plot” being actually revealed — you get the impression Pynchon is very smart and also probably very high.

And so you read on through the torrent of words like some sort of Zen ascetic training by standing under a waterfall. Painful at first, though soothing in a meditative, mind-numbing way. Plot and characterization are happening, just underneath the accumulated murky waters’ depths, like the layers of strata atop Slothrop’s messy desk.

There’s something about an American army official named Tyrone Slothrop, who was psychologically conditioned as a baby, using a mysterious stimuli, to have a sexual connection with German V-2 rockets. Now he’s being tested by a slew of psychologists (some legitimate, some more fringe) as they wax philosophic on different theories and bombs continue to fall all over late WW2 London in a Poisson distribution.

And then comes more absurdity with the weird sex/desperate love between the hilariously named characters Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake. If the nervous, handwringing of Roger is anything to go by, his relationship with Jessica may not make it through Part 2, with Jessica probably poised to leave him for Jeremy Beaver. But what’s in a name?

The love triangle of Mexico-Beaver-Swanlake is one of the novel’s easier threads to follow. So much else comes and goes willy-nilly that it’s hard to keep track of, regardless how brilliant it may seem. It’s a novel that I’ll absolutely need to reread, annotations/guide in hand.

Then there’s the Pavlovian Dr. Pointsman, which brings up even more about psychology and will, which falls in behind the already dense manage of maths, voodoo, general-WW2-horror-stuff, and the hotchpotch of folly around every page. The mind reels.

So is Pynchon hinting at the absurdity of contemporary life and its density and sharing a Big Message about how life is hard to navigate? Probably not. Is Pynchon writing however he just-so-happens to feel like and may not care if you understand? Probably yes. Is it Great Literature or a hippy’s ragbag of poop and sex jokes? God knows. More on that as the novel continues to speed through my mind like a runaway train.