Product Description

"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II."-- Edward Mendelson, The New Republic

Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46128 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

Amazon.com Review
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. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.

Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.

That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow 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. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.

Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo

About the Author
Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937. He is the author of The Crying of Lot 49, V., Vineland, Slow Learner, and Mason & Dixon.

Customer Reviews

Mostly garbage
I think reviewing this novel would be more difficult than reading it was, so I'm not going to bother. Here's my bottom line opinion: It is evident from the novel that Pynchon is unquestionably a smart man and more knowledgable about most things than I could ever hope to be, but Gravity's Rainbow is on the whole pretty bad.

If extracted, the mediocre main plot would occupy all of perhaps 200 pages. It might have been somewhat interesting standing on its own. But the other 650+ (!!!) pages of non value adding digression utterly ruins this novel. Occasionally humorous but mostly a tiresome chore to get through. I'm not even sure how I did it. I read it during lunch hour perhaps twice a week, over a period of maybe five or six months. Never got engrossed and only enjoyed what I was reading maybe 5%-10% of the time. But I persevered for two reasons:

1. I'd heard it was the most difficult fiction novel ever and challenging to finish. I wanted to see if I could do it.

2. I'd hoped the plot would improve further in as Slothrop neared his goal.

Ok, so I finished it but was the time spent worth it? Absolutely not, without question. And no, the plot doesn't really improve towards the end.

Don't bother.

I want those hours of my life back...
This book was a thoroughly juvenile jumble totally lacking in cohesiveness, or -- if you are desperately (and pretentiously) trying to impress someone that you know deep down inside is smarter than you -- it is edgy and groundbreaking (profound and accomplished, if you write reviews for the National Review).

The prose was dense and stumbling. And "dense and stumbling" does not translate into "my mental genius was only able to attain the mystical Pynchon epiphany after purchasing an annotated guide" -- it means that the writing was clumsy, halting, poorly structured, and a royal pain.

"Dense" seems to come up as a compliment in many of the reviews here -- as some sort of self-congratulatory pat on the back for the fact that the reviewer is discerning enough (and lonely enough) to read this book cover to cover multiple times. Oddly enough, I think that "inability to express oneself clearly in writing" is not an overwhelming reference for an author.

The schizophrenic non-linear method of laying the story out is not clever and was not by any means new or groundbreaking when this book came out -- it had been done before, and it had been done well. It was done badly here. In this case, the literary gimmick seemed like an attempt to cover for a shoddy story.

An overwhelming fascination with genitalia does not make a book "edgy". A good fistful of drug references do not make a book "transcendent". If you are unable to derive intense meaning from the randomly strung-together thoughts (being generous here) don't think of it as a personal failing, you've just not been properly hoodwinked into rejecting a belief that good literature ought to be well-written and meaningful.

If you do choose to make the effort to attain the Gravity Rainbow epiphany, you will no doubt be thoroughly rewarded since you could read anything into this load of garbage that you might desire. I fail to see how your time couldn't be better spent reading a good book.

Next time I want to hear a string of profanity-laced nonsense, I'll just tape record a group of intoxicated adolescents.

Kudos to the reviewer who referenced Joyce -- an appropriate shout-out to the trailblazing author who pioneered the technique of using general incoherency to give the finger to pretentious English majors everywhere.

Fear and Loathing in Peenemunde
This is the mother of all post-modern novels. Much has been said about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; even more written about it since it was published 35 years ago.

There are a myriad of threads running through this novel. I have read Gravity's Rainbow four times in my life thus far; each reading offered something new; something I did not pick up on the last time.

Since Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon has published two other meaty novels:Mason & Dixon: A Novel and Against the Day. And one not so meaty one:Vineland. Each of these novels deserve their own merit; however, it is Gravity's Rainbow parabolic rise to mythic status that changed the course of modern fiction as we know it.

But heck, kids, don't take my word for it. Go on and order yourself a copy of GR and see what all the hub-bub's about, bub. And for the meek there is a companion guide to this novel:A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources And Contexts for Pynchon's Novel. I highly suggest picking up the companion if it's your first time out. Once you read this book you'll want to read it again and again over time. Take my word for it.