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: #4974 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

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

rewarding and challenging; but certainly tough going at times!
The book is certainly a challenge, but enjoyable if you follow it on its own terms. My advice: start on page 1, and keep reading until the end - do not skip sections no matter how much you may be tempted!

The writing is very entertaining, engaging and hilarious at times; on other occasions it is incredibly frustrating. I found it best to just keep plugging along without trying too hard to always get the meaning.

Some of the stranger sections probably require a few readings before you get a sense of what Pynchon is saying. Don't let it bother you, however. I found that repeated readings of a particularly hard section will often bring great rewards as the piece begins to take shape as a whole, even when individual sentences are completely un-intelligible.

It is not worth getting into the plot too much in a short review, but what I will say is that this book is absolutely vast. It contains layers upon layers of detailed imagery, tangents, tangents upon tangents, and a vast amount of cultural and social references. It does require some effort to complete.

For these reasons, I fully expected that this book would be a very love/it hate affair, and the reviews so far seem to bear this out. If you are up for a bit of more challenging read than the norm, however, I think reading this novel is as good a way as any to spend (admittedly huge amounts of!) your time.

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.

Like climbing Everest without oxygen.
Looking at all the besotted reviews on this page makes me feel like a Philistine or irredeemably stupid, but I just cannot warm to Thomas Pynchon. I feel compelled to justify the 2-star rating by pointing out I'm not casting any aspersions on the quality of his work, just pointing out how much I did not enjoy reading it.

Gravity's Rainbow could perhaps be best described as Catch 22 meets Naked Lunch, as written by Saul Bellow. It shares a lot of the best qualities of those bright lights in American literature: it's wildly inventive, outrageously seamy, intelligently written and often wickedly funny.

Unfortunately, it also shares a lot of the flaws. It's hugely incoherent and the beautiful language meanders through mammoth sentences across a dozen ideas without ever really binding them together. You feel that if there is any sense to be had, it remains stuck in the author's head. This is in spite of the fact he seems to have poured his every wild thought onto the page as it occurred to him. It's beautifully written, but it's a mess. It's like someone gave you a box of extremely expensive chocolates but left them in the back seat of the car and they all melted together.

I had to wade through every page to the bitter end. In fact, I read half a dozen other novels in the meantime purely to provide myself with a break. It was like stopping for oxygen while climbing Mt Everest. Hey, it's nice to say you reached the top, but was it really worth the frostbite?