Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Summary
London, December 1944, under the V-2s: the rockets arrive faster than sound, so the explosion comes first and the scream after, death preceding its own warning. Into this inverted world the novel drops Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose sexual adventures across the city, plotted on a map, precisely anticipate the rocket strikes, a correlation that makes him the most interesting man in Europe to a cabal of behaviorists, psychics and intelligence agencies the reader never fully sees.
What follows resists summary by design. Slothrop is run through conditioning experiments, casinos and paranoia until he slips his handlers and disappears into the Zone, the administrative void of occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, hunting the 00000, a one off rocket fired at the war's end with a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät, aboard. Around his quest Pynchon deploys some four hundred characters, songs, seances, a sentient light bulb, corporate genealogies of the plastics cartel, Pavlovian theory, Herero history and the most notorious set pieces in postwar fiction, all of it orbiting one intuition: that the war was a front, that the technologies it bred have their own agenda, and that paranoia is just good pattern recognition arriving early.
The four parts run from December 1944 to September 1945, war's end to the opening of the next one, and Slothrop himself simply dissolves, scattered across the last hundred pages like signal into noise.
Around seven hundred and sixty pages, and genuinely hard: the difficulty is the subject.
Best for readers ready to be defeated in places and rewarded extravagantly for continuing, by the wildest major novel America has produced.
Historical Context & Significance
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers, and Pynchon, already the most famous invisible man in American letters, did not appear: he sent the comedian Professor Irwin Corey, whose double talk acceptance speech baffled an audience that largely did not know it was being pranked, one of the great moments in prize history.
The same season the Pulitzer fiction jury chose the novel unanimously and the advisory board refused it, finding it turgid, overwritten and in parts obscene, and gave no award at all for 1974, the refusal that has followed the Pulitzer ever since.
The critical settlement has been complete: the book stands at the center of the postmodern canon, the one American novel regularly set beside Ulysses for scale and influence, and Pynchon's non appearance has held for five decades, through a Nobel scale reputation and a MacArthur, the man himself remaining a rumour with a bibliography.