Reviews

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Only show reviews with written explanations

hadesttw's review

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5.0

all i learned was that the kirghiz light isn't worth it

kombrink's review against another edition

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Not my cup of tea :/

m_henchard's review

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1.0

1.5
At a point about two-thirds into this monster, Tyrone Slothrop "has begun to thin, to scatter," his "temporal bandwidth" narrowing to the present:

"The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment...."

This is precisely what reading this book is like. I started with robust energy, taking notes, diagramming character relationships, highlighting luminous passages; but by the last 200 pp., my focus had narrowed, Slothrop-like, to whatever sentence I happened to be reading. I couldn't remember what had happened or anticipate what was coming next. Often I had no clue what was going on in the scene and, worse, didn't care.

The good: GR is a work of obsession by an extremely bright and imaginative writer. There are occasional astonishing paragraphs that couldn't be written by anyone else, like this one:

Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not, he’ll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive’s fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje’s.

It's a beautiful paragraph that gets across a fresh analogy as elegantly and economically as possible; as he showed in The Crying of Lot 49, he's capable of writing with discipline and restraint. But such paragraphs are rare, and get rarer as the book progresses, like they're distributed according to a negative exponential function*, giving way to exhausting pages-long bricks of Beat riffing a la Burroughs or Kerouac. (*Indeed, this may be the most written-by-a-horny-engineer book of all time. Tortured physics/math analogies alternate one-to-one with scenes of absolutely revolting sexual deviance.)

The book's worst offense: the characters don't seem real. I can tolerate any absurd plot contrivances as long as what the characters do, think, say, feel, etc. seem real and convincing. But he's unable or unwilling to do the pedestrian work of making his characters actual people. And this makes the flippant nihilism of the book's "wacky" goings-on all the more tedious and annoying. (This is not the inspired silliness of Wodehouse or Douglas Adams.)

I suppose I could go on, but I don't care enough. I'm grateful to have discovered the outer limits of my patience as a reader, but I think I'm done with Pynchon.