Hanging black curtains in the window of a dingy apartment in suburban LA, two blocks from the Pacific Ocean, blocking out the light. Inside, Thomas Pynchon—in his thirties, clumsy, with a Zappa-type stomachache—scribbled on rows of checkered sheets of paper. The scene was unspoiled: a crib, a few books, a jumble of letters, a collection of linen piggy banks. On his desk is a special model rocket, assembled together with a paper clip and an old pencil eraser. A friend of Pynchon described the vibe in a gentlemen’s magazine as “a monk’s cell decorated by the Salvation Army.” Outside, the world is raging. The Watts riot. LSD. Space race. water gate. Bomb. Society is taken over by one convulsion after another. Fantasies of post-World War II prosperity turned into generational uprisings, paranoia, and mallard drills. At his desk, Pynchon is processing it all, absorbing it—just like Emerson’s clear eyeball, but overextended and slightly blurred from too much Panama Red. What made the world spin?
To get to the bottom of such a Great Question, Pynchon must have read a lot: about synthetic chemistry and Calvinist prophecy, the Kabbalah, and the reform of the Turkic alphabet. But most of all, it looks like he read about rocket. There is a point in the rocket’s parabola called Brennschluss (“exhausted,” in German). It marks the time when the rocket runs out of fuel and continues to plunge down solely by gravity. When he framed it in his famous novel gravity rainbowWorld War II—with rockets, death camps, and atomic bombs sealing humanity’s suicide pact with technology—was the Brennschluss of civilization, and we’ve been in free fall ever since.
February 2023 marks its 50th anniversary Gravity rainbow. A literary sensation that was controversial when it was published — it was notoriously snubbed by Pulitzer’s higher-ups, despite unanimous recommendations from the novel’s jury — the novel since that has earned a fearsome reputation. Alike Ulysses, RecognitionAnd Endless jokeGravity Rainbow is the kind of book people pretend to read to look smart on the bus. ONE New York Magazine reviewers once called it “perhaps the least read book in American history.”
This reputation is clearly a detriment to the book itself and to potential curious readers. Time to pick up gravity rainbow The time now is. It was at once a busy almanac of its time and a sort of field guide for ourselves. It echoes strangely in the new millennium. In a way, the greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism in our day, the ghastly death tinged with stupidity of the clown, hints at an eventual, fateful world. , caught up with Pynchon. We’re still living under Gravity’s Rainbow.
If anyone knows anything about the author, it’s that no one knows much about him. Arguably the most committed living mystery of American letters, Pynchon practically makes Cormac McCarthy look like a literary fly. After graduating from Cornell in 1959, Pynchon moved to Seattle, where he wrote technical documents and internal newsletters for Boeing. It was there that he became familiar with the science, logistics, and jargon of heavy weapons manufacturing and the emerging aerospace industry. That’s also where he began honing his own literary style—in one article he compared the relationship between the U.S. Air Force and private aerospace contractors to a marriage happy, using the ironic tone that would later define his novels. Pynchon was, for a brief time, essentially an officer (albeit a cheeky, ironic one) in America’s expanding military-industrial complex. This means he knows about ballistics. And rockets. And what are these weapons capable of doing, not only with their intended targets, but also with the souls of those who created them.
Anti-war, anti-capitalism, and extremely vulgar, gravity rainbow is a novel of ideas, big and small. Over 700 pages, Pynchon offers a huge tour of plots and side plots, introduces hundreds of characters and talks about rocket science, cinema, German linguistics, and Pavlovian behaviorism. , probability theory, witchcraft, futurism, couture, chemical hallucinations, and the destruction of the dodo. But, amid the novel’s encyclopedic content, there is something like a story.
It’s the story of Tyrone Slothrop, a Massachusetts blue-blooded man who was educated at Harvard. Because the reference point of his sexual encounters seems to perfectly match the Nazi V-2 rocket attack in London, a small group of Allied intelligence agents believes that he possesses a strange magnetism or magic. Various factions push Slothrop around as a pawn, using him to further their own schemes, as he scours the Area (nickname given to post-war Germany) in a Exciting outdoor adventure. He rescues a girl from a giant octopus. Wearing a stolen cape and tattered Wagnerian opera helmet, he transforms himself into the superhero Rocketman and retrieves a hash brick hidden in Potsdam. He meets Mickey Rooney, prolific adultery, gets into a cake fight on high, and almost gets castrated. Along the way, he scrambles for information about a mysterious rocket known only as 00000 and tries to analyze his own motives from the motivations imposed on him. What moves is Slothrop doing freely? And which one is being guided by some ominous invisible hand? A henchman’s job is to unchain himself from the dictatorship. Slothrop’s strange adventures, and the novel’s seemingly chaotic chaos, are orchestrated by one thing: rockets.
The V-2 rocket is the first thing the reader encounters in the opening lines of the novel: “A scream echoed through the sky. It happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” The Nazi weapon broke the sound barrier: It exploded before anyone heard it arrive. No warnings. V-2 violated basic notions of cause and effect. gravity rainbow unfold in this decay.
