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February 27, 2023 2:38 PM

Short-circuiting the very language of literary value, permanently wrongfooting the custodians of taste, Gravity’s Rainbow proposes a new way of thinking about what we treasure most, what we fritter away, and what is taken from us. from Join the Counterforce: Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern epic Gravity’s Rainbow at 50

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was published on February 28, 1973

We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow by John Semley [who has read the book]
Developing a Penchant for Pynchon by Peter Biles [who hasn't]

Pynchon: An Introduction

posted by chavenet (46 comments total)

The more you know! Pynchon Wiki: Gravity's Rainbow
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:14 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Man, this is on my list of "giant books to read." I made it all the way through Infinite Jest and 2666, no regrets. And I'm most of the way through Life: A User's Manual. But Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow remain unread.

Speaking of giant books, I got rid of The Tunnel and John Barth's Letters yesterday. One has too much Hitler, the other is too meta.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:25 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Professor Irwin Corey accepts the National Book Award Fiction Citation for Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow*

* Now with 100 percent more streaker: "...1974 for example, when a streaker (remember them?) enlivened the proceedings by racing through Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center shouting, ''Read books! Read books!''" (NYT)
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:26 PM on February 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

My local library does not offer Gravity’s Rainbow as an e-book.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:32 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read gravity’s rainbow over a summer in college and did find it really amazing. i think it takes about 100 pages to really get going but it did become a page turner eventually. the whole book, much like ulysses, is in fact a dick joke, in case you are concerned it’s all too high brow and pretentious. it is very masculine though. i’m curious about how it will strike me now with 20 years more of maturity though.
posted by dis_integration at 3:52 PM on February 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

I recently realised that what's particular about Pynchon is that I like him. I find it pleasant to be in his company for the duration the book. Which could be quite a while. Like Vonnegut in that way, he's someone I enjoy being around. Gravity's Rainbow is an extraordinary book, but I don't think it should be used as some kind of test. It's a lot of fun if it catches you right, and if it's not fun I'm not sure it's being read properly.

A-and (as I always say when the book comes up) it's a musical!
posted by Grangousier at 3:55 PM on February 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

'hundred pages, eh, well maybe I'll have to try again and put a yellow sticky that I have to get past before loosing interest.
posted by sammyo at 3:57 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ah, that reminds me of the time I took a book off the shelf and told myself "I'll give it fifty pages to get started and see how I feel about it". That book was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and I never did finish it.
posted by Grangousier at 4:01 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I always felt that one main unstated joke of Gravity's Rainbow is that the plot is a Plot.

And as far as getting thru it goes, if you can just get past the Giant Adenoid episode and make to where Slothrop gets introduced, it'll carry you the rest of the way. Just don't be squeamish.
posted by tspae at 4:04 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

My first Gravity's Rainbow story:

I finally started reading it after being fascinated by the book's cryptic appearance, the delight of Crying of Lot 49, and the weird things my friends said about it.

I don't remember how far I got, because of what happened next.

As best we can reconstruct, I was walking across the University's of Michigan's long central sidewalk at night. The Diag was slathered with ice and snow, and I slipped and fell, striking my head on the concrete. This concussion had me staggering around for some period of time, head bloody, trying to find my hat. A friend happened to find me and kindly started walking me to the hospital.

The concussion also short-circuited my memory, because every few minutes I would "come to" and recognize my friend as if seeing him for the first time. "Fred, how great to see you! I seem to have fallen." "Yes yes," he murmured, and continued guiding me to the emergency room.

Some time later the memory reboots died down and I really came to in the ER, badly shaken and confused. Someone put my backpack next to me and I dug into it, coming up with... a beaten-up copy of Gravity's Rainbow. I knew I had been reading it, but could remember nothing of it. So on the hospital bed I turned to the beginning and found I'd annotated the margins, at times extensively, but while they were indeed mine (the bad handwriting and codes were unmistakeable) I couldn't remember making them. I started reading the novel again.

To this day I haven't reconstructed exactly what happened. And I've reread into the book repeatedly, yet can't remember which readings went first, or which were actually dreams.
posted by doctornemo at 4:09 PM on February 27, 2023 [29 favorites]

(If nothing else, one must make it to and through the "Disgusting English Candy Drill" episode w/ Mrs. Quoad. Priceless.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:15 PM on February 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've promised myself a re-read of Against the Day first but I would love a re-read of Gravity's Rainbow if for no other reason than to get to the Disgusting English Candy Drill so that I can read it aloud to my daughter who loves to read but doesn't understand the true power of language just yet.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:16 PM on February 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Second Gravity's Rainbow story:

In 1995 I was in Bosnia during the war, which is a story for another time. I was with a group of academics meeting in Mostar, which had been blockaded by militias, some of whom decided to fire into the city while we were there.

One of the academics was actually an ex-academic. He'd gotten a PhD in Balkan history, landed a teaching job, hated it, quit, and became an insurance executive. He made enough money to help bankroll our expedition. We talked for hours about everything: Balkan politics, economics, literature, etc.

One day we crossed the Neretva River on a tiny, temporary military bridge, barely wide enough for our jeep. As we loudly rattled across it, we discussed south Balkan politics, and suddenly my friend burst out in song: "The Sanjak of Novi Pazar....!" Then he looked at me, waggled his eyebrows, and added: "...right?"

I thought my poor friend had snapped. The stress of being in a war zone had overwhelmed him. I didn't know what to do, so I muttered something. He looked very disappointed and reply: "And I thought you were a Thomas Pynchon fan!"

Then it hit me. In Gravity's Rainbow's there's a song about the Sanjak of Novi Pazar... and we were just talking about the city in real life, not too far from where we were in our rickety jeep under occasional gunfire!
posted by doctornemo at 4:17 PM on February 27, 2023 [18 favorites]

Some decades ago I travelled around the world the cheap way, mostly by bus (I exaggerate: I travelled mostly around the USA and Australia by bus; more civilised countries have trains) on long, slow journeys broken by very little, and so I read Tom Jones, Life: A User's Manual and Gravity's Rainb... no, wait, I must have read Gravity's Rainbow before that because when I got to LA and interviewed a not-famous-yet Matt Groening, fresh from the screening room where he had seen the first episode of the Simpsons just back from the Korean animators and it was so horrible they'd sent it back to be redone, he was depressed and didn't really want to talk about the Simpsons and so instead we just talked, and one of the the things we talked about was Gravity's Rainbow and he told me that years before, when he'd been living in New Mexico, I think, sharing a house with people he didn't really know, one of them had had a mysterious boyfriend who turned out to be Thomas Pynchon, or at least claimed to be Thomas Pynchon, which was very cool, what with Pynchon being this weird elusive unknown anonymous author about whom, in those pre-internet days, nobody seemed to know anything real, and a good talking point because later when I was working for Magazine Week, a magazine about magazines, and they sent me to interview the publisher John Brown, I was able to break the ice by saying that he was the second person I'd met who'd actually met Thomas Pynchon, he having mentioned this in a TV culture piece about the author around the publication of Vineland, which he probably remembered because he later hired me to work on Bizarre magazine; all of which has me hazy and nostalgic for (a) banana breakfast, (b) un esprit d'autobus that I hadn't taken the Glass Bead Game in my suitcase too, and (c) a very strong sensation that it must be time for me to read Gravity's Rainbow again.
posted by Hogshead at 4:46 PM on February 27, 2023 [21 favorites]

The Man
who broke the Bank
at Monte

Carlo
posted by clavdivs at 5:21 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the 90s I had a long commute on public transportation, so I burned through many big books that I hadn't had time to read before: Ulysses, Life: A User's Manual, Tidewater Tales, Infinite Jest, Ada or Ardor, House of Leaves, The Brothers Karamazov, and eventually Gravity's Rainbow.

This was a Picador edition that I had bought on a trip to Edinburgh. I had read the first episode of the book probably twenty-five times and was absolutely baffled. As others have said, once you get to Slothrop things start to pick up. I was blown away by Pynchon's talent, humor and erudition and later read everything he wrote up to and including the wonderful Mason & Dixon. Sorry to say I haven't kept up with his 21st century work.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 5:30 PM on February 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Fritz, Inherent Vice is a hoot, and Bleeding Edge is a paranoir. They’re much more streamlined than Mason & Dixon or GR, but good in their own right!
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:47 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Speaking of big books and reading them… I had an anthro professor in college, who told of us his time in the boondocks of the mountains in Mexico. He went there to spend a year with a tribe of people, not really connected with other tribes. Before he left he gathered up the big books he always wanted to read and figured that this was the opportunity. He took Ulysses, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and all three volumes of Capital by Marx. And once in the mountains, to be there away from civilization for a year, he deeply regretted all three of his choices.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:51 PM on February 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

> "That book was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and I never did finish it."

Aw, you only had a few hundred pages to go before the main character is born.
posted by kyrademon at 5:59 PM on February 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Come on, the Banana Breakfast is two pages in. If that doesn,t grab you i dont know what...
posted by supermedusa at 6:12 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

This post has finally motivated me to crack open the spine of Gravity's Rainbow. Thanks for this!
posted by lock robster at 7:40 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is astonishing on its really weird face, and really rich when you dig into contexts, but you have to be in the right mood for it. (I used to teach his far shorter Sentimental Journey to give people a taste.)
posted by doctornemo at 8:02 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Speaking of big books and teaching, I remember someone describing a modern lit class with two books: Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. You could get so much out of them: modernism and pomo, a big swath of the 20th century, not to mention religion, politics, Argentine cinema...
posted by doctornemo at 8:03 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had an intense Thomas Pynchon phase a little over 20 years ago for reasons I can't reconstruct. I suppose I read everything up to Mason & Dixon, which defeated me, again for reasons I can't reconstruct.

I don't remember if I read Gravity's Rainbow first, presumably drawn in by the romance of difficulty, or if I'd actually read Lot 49 first and been charmed by its relative ease. I may have read V. a couple times.

Anyway I haven't touched him since, also for reasons I can't reconstruct. In one sense, I would definitely get more out of GR if I read it again, since I understand more of the context and preoccupations behind its psychedelic world war. On the other hand, the drive that propelled me through it had something to do with being young and stupid in ways I've mostly left behind.
posted by grobstein at 8:05 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just reflecting on time here. When I read it I thought it was already “old”, but that was 30 years ago so more than half as long as it’s been around.
posted by sjswitzer at 8:09 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I kinda feel bad for the folks who start into Pynch with GR and bounce off never to try anything else. I'm with Grangousier, I like being in Pynch's world. He's one of those writers whose rhythms allow my mind to wander to the most interesting places mid-passage but never punish me for my inattention.
GR isn't my favorite, but i'm between books at the moment, so I might celebrate the anniversary with a re-read, or at least a dabble.
For those who might want to work up to M&D I suggest spending some time with Patrick O'Brian, the master of period dialogue, and then Barthe's Sot-Weed Factor, once you've got those rhythms down M&D will fly.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:20 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mason & Dixon is one of my favorite books and I cried at the end of Against the Day but read Gravity's Rainbow in college and I don't remember it. This is getting me incredibly pumped to go back to it.
posted by charismatic megafauna at 8:25 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sorry, don't mean to derail, but I think even Pynchon would find it funny that one of the authors/posts linked to here (the one by Peter Biles) is written by an editor from a wing of the Discovery Institute, the anti-evolution and all-around kook "science" outfit. The MindMatters website seems like another attempt for the anti-modernity crowd to insinuate itself into the broader discourse.
posted by Snowden at 9:42 PM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes. I quite enjoyed it, but I’ve always liked the artist’s take on Schiele. Unfortunately, the artist is a huge piece of shit, so while I used to want a copy I sure wouldn’t buy it now.
posted by hototogisu at 9:43 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read Gravity's Rainbow over the night of the day I bought it at University Bookstore. By then I had already zoomed through V and The Crying of Lot 49 on the days that they were published, too, having previously found out about Pynchon via the liner notes of Mimi and Richard Fariña's Celebrations for.a Grey Day, wherein V was the title of not only Pynchon's first novel but also that of a raga-esque dulcimer solo punctuated by Bruce Langhorne's Turkish Tambour or frame drum as well.
posted by y2karl at 10:23 PM on February 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oy, I know I've got to read this. I've read and loved most of the other books people include in lists of books like GR but I bounced off it hard in high school and never tried again. Something really disgusting happened and I just noped out, closed the book and never reopened it. Funny thing is, I'm not actually sure what it was that did it. Guess I better read it again and find out...maybe this summer.
posted by potrzebie at 11:55 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Was it Brigadier Pudding's unusual peccadillo by any chance? I remember being a bit freaked out by that.
posted by Grangousier at 12:28 AM on February 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Something really disgusting happened

GR is full of scatalogical content, early on featuring a jazz club dive through the toilet into the sewer (defying all physical laws) and also some nazi s&m with a side of copraphilia. “eat shit” sounds meaner in german. i started rereading it again last night and it’s also quite horny to boot. the book is about lots of things, the movement of history, late stage capitalism, the transmigration of souls, but also shit piss and penises, endless parades of penises, pendulous iron bananas gone ballistic in the sky and in bed. it definitely is a 20th century book written by a privileged white man.
posted by dis_integration at 5:25 AM on February 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

Like a lot of people, I enjoyed Lot 49, and then bounced off GR. Probably time to give it another try, this time keeping in mind that it was meant to be fun.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:18 AM on February 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I read it once, in the late 90s in an unemployed moment when I could spend 18 hours in bed with a book. Afterwards I met up with some friends for a movie and they brought their most unlikable acquaintance, and I recall the fugue-like rage it inspired to have to interact with him as something inextricably linked to the experience of reading it. Maybe that's a good enough reason for a re-read.

Also I loved my paperback edition, which I acquired at the Bridge House thrift store when I moved to New Orleans, and unfortunately it has not survived all my subsequent moves.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 6:56 AM on February 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

dis_integration, knowing me, I bet it was the shit-eating lolol. Not my thing! Well, maybe I've lost my capacity to be shocked by it in the intervening years. We'll see.

I can think of only one other book I've put down because it was too filthy - I was trying to read Naked Lunch on a train seated right by an old lady and was blushing so furiously I thought I might actually lose consciousness. Never picked it back up and honestly even just THINKING of that train ride I'm breaking out in a sweat.
posted by potrzebie at 9:26 AM on February 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

folks who start into Pynch with GR and bounce off never to try anything else

Reminds me of people starting Samuel Delany with Dhalgren.
posted by doctornemo at 9:54 AM on February 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Also I loved my paperback edition

I have that same mass-market sized edition, although the spine is held together with tape (so not in "good" condition). But $34 for that used! Yow. I wish they would put out more "literary" fiction in that size instead of the 8.5-9 inch "trade" sizes. Gravity's Rainbow is a little fat but it still fits in my back pocket for walking to the park to read without carrying a bag as well. And the new editions are all deckle-edge, I think, which I have very negative feels about (how would you like to *not* be able to flip the pages??? and pay more for the pleasure? because it looks fancy?). At least you don't have to get a knife out like with some French books. Sigh.
posted by dis_integration at 9:55 AM on February 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had a couple of failed attempts under my belt when my college held a "Gravity's Marathon" where people would take shifts reading it aloud in the library plaza. I showed up during the story of Baby Bulb Byron when, if you'll excuse the metaphor, a light bulb blazed above my head: Pynchon uses all of his incandescent (sorry!) cleverness to be deeply and fundamentally silly. All in the plaza had a blast, joining in and trying to agree on a tune whenever there were lyrics.

Also, I've said this elsewhere more than once: If you've been discouraged, try the audiobook read by George Guidall. A masterpiece of interpretation.
posted by whuppy at 3:39 PM on February 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've read and enjoyed his books through M&D except for GR, which has thwarted me a few times. This post serves as a excellent reminder that I should get back to GR and the more recent ones. As far as GR goes, I have it on my phone. If I ever get stuck someplace where I have power but no internet access, I know what I'm doing. Hopefully I'll get to it before then.
posted by mollweide at 7:09 PM on February 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

...Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it.

posted by y2karl at 9:24 PM on February 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

History Is Hard to Decode: On 50 Years of Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' - "Thomas Pynchon's novel 'Gravity's Rainbow,' a half century old today, has never seemed more relevant."

50 Years Later, Gravity's Rainbow Finally Came True - "In 1973, Thomas Pynchon unleashed his mega-meta epic on an America in between two epochs. His novel captured the (dis)spirit of the age—and foretold much about the nation's future."
posted by kliuless at 10:10 PM on February 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Living dangerously in this apocalyptic moment - "Pynchon warns that we are now facing the imminent annihilation of human civilization. Only if we overcome the “either/or” mentality and embrace a “both/and” construction of mind, perhaps we can postpone the impending Judgment Day. Otherwise, we all will perish eventually."
posted by chavenet at 1:45 AM on March 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

From the article kliuless linked to above, QFT: Fifty years ago, Gravity’s Rainbow was like its own little internet. Its value was not in and of itself, but rather in the way it led you elsewhere, elsewheres, plural, its network a circuitous system of interlocking and ultimately diverging pathways, any of which can be followed out of the novel, so that a reader could wind up pursuing engineering physics (as Pynchon himself originally did at Cornell) or history or literature or slapstick comedy—it’s all in there. For a person in 1973 to cobble together such an extraordinary array of disparate subjects would be to spend endless hours in libraries, sifting through countless texts with hardly any guidance. This of course assumes that one had the imagination in the first place to conceive of these eclectic categories cohabiting the same space, which so few of us possess. Pynchon is not like us.
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on March 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

the way it led you elsewhere, elsewheres, plural, its network a circuitous system of interlocking and ultimately diverging pathways

We Await Silent Trystero's Empire
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:47 AM on March 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

From the article kliuless linked to above, QFT: Fifty years ago, Gravity’s Rainbow was like its own little internet. Its value was not in and of itself, but rather in the way it led you elsewhere, elsewheres, plural, its network a circuitous system of interlocking and ultimately diverging pathways, any of which can be followed out of the novel

This is meshing in my head with the Palo Alto thread, because before it was where we lived, before it was even a thing, the idea of the internet was a part of the military-research complex. Famously, hypertext was first publicized in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, the Raytheon founder and military science administrator. (Not a Palo Altian but a major figure in the network.) And this military-research complex is in turn one of the subjects of Pynchon's writing in GR and elsewhere.
posted by grobstein at 12:20 PM on March 2, 2023 [2 favorites]