Product Description

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, "Gravity's Rainbow", refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. "Gravity's Rainbow", however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. "Gravity's Rainbow" is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5128 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Review
Between V., Pynchon's maverick if disorderly first novel, and Gravity's Rainbow which is still more unstrung and far denser while lacking the narrative encroachment of the earlier book, there is even a direct line of extension. Very literally - it is a third longer than the original's 500 pages; but where V. was only death-directed, this seems almost death-obsessed and annihilation (from the V-bombs of World War II to the later Rocket with which this is concerned) looms over every page in a world where the technology of terror presides. . . . "Is the cycle over now and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon?" Somehow surfacing above it are other nonspecific, mystic, psychokinetic forces, perhaps Gravity, the "extrasensory in Earth's mindbody," or more simply, just a sense of wonder. They are personified in Tyrone Slothrop, the central character, who is identified as some sort of receiver when first institutionalized in the Abreaction Ward of a London hospital - he's paranoid - and later tagged as the Rocketman and sent to the Zone where the later postwar action partially takes place. Around him are all sorts of others - scientists, behaviorists, friends (Tantivy who is killed; statistician Roger Mexico who remains trapped in the detritus of the War and is unfit for Peace) and assorted girls. It is reductive, perhaps presumptive, to say what this is all about - the "depolarizing" or neurotic instability which follows war; the metallic mechanization of life thereafter; the blacks and blackness; drugs and sex - a kind of vacant, performing sex; and a lot of catch-as-catch-can cabala all figure in Pynchon's sort of social surrealism. He has made no concessions: from the proliferation of acronyms (some very clever) to the hybrid referrals (King Kong, Murphy's Law, Godel's Theorem) tailgating each other in one paragraph; to the words (azimuth, megalo, runcible, terrenity) which are an "impedance." As of course is all this jammed input - a parlous challenge to the reader's perseverance. But then however much the latter may have been strained, one must pay tribute to Pynchon's plastic imagination, his stunning creative energy, and here and there the transcendent prose: "It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame" - all marvelously descriptive of the world in which we live and are sure to die. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason & Dixon. He recieved the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Customer Reviews

Everything you need to know and how to say it
When this book was published, I was inspired to do a Master's degree studying it closely, and that was 1976. Here we are 32 years later and there is no book since published, or published before, written by one man, with the depth, range, accuracy, and pertinence to the human condition now and likely to be for the next 100 years. This book is not a novel in a coherent and completely satisfying manner, capable of being read in a matter of sitting down for a few hours at a time over a weekend, but neither is Ulysses, nor Brothers Karamazov. To approach this you must have a broad understanding and an expansive imagination, capable of responding to the world of Pynchon. I have read everything by Pynchon, before or since, and GR is his master work, no question. People will read this as long as they can read, and they will wonder, and be amazed in wonder. It is essential on the shelf of any person who reads well, even as a challenge for them at various moments in their life. To read it in a week, or read it without any break as is done at Princeton every year, is to alter the state of your mind irrevocably. Be prepared, because you will never think and feel and speak and write as you did before.

Ulysses or Not?
When I makes style I makes style, as old Mr P said. And when I makes plot I makes rubbish. So I do, dear reader, says he. Begob Sir, says the dear reader, God send you don't make them in the one book. (Mix and match)
He can and does write sublimely, but if there's anything challenging in Gravity's Rainbow Rainbow, its the challenge of a kid kicking the back of your seat through the whole of Parsifal.

Gave up after 500 pages
I chucked this book away in defeat last night after reading 500 pages. I really really tried to give this book a chance, but its ceaseless stream of meaingless abstraction as far as I am concerned. Its not worth reading in my view. I took up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" afterwards and got more satisfaction of the opening page of that book than i did the 500 pages of this book. Be warned :-)