Review: Gravity's Rainbow
As of today, I'm done with Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. I listened to the audiobook version. I think I got approximately ⅕th of the way through it before I tapped out.
What to say, really? Five minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know. The novel is set in England during World War II and primarily follows a set of characters working for various military intelligence services, focused specifically on finding out information about the V-2 rocket. It is viciously post-modern, with chaotic and obscene inclusions of sex, drugs, violence, and absurdism. Initially, critics described it as "unreadable", "turgid", and "over-written." In more modern times, it is considered one of the best American novels ever written.
I agree with the initial assessment. "Overwritten" describes this book perfectly. There's no question as to whether or not Pynchon is a good writer, stylistically. The first few passages of the book were like magic to me -- I was absolutely blown away to hear how effortlessly this man seemed to form the most perfect sentences. They have a mesmerizing cadence. It wasn't just the sound of the words that really shined, nor the meaning of them, it was the fit -- specific characters would say things and I would think to myself, "Huh, well isn't that just the spitting image of that character. I'm sure there's not a single other word that would have fit that character better."
Imagine listening to a beautiful fugue, fascinated by how intricate and complex and well-designed it is, and then the song repeats again and again and again for about a hundred more hours. Any reasonable person would start to hate it. By the end of my time with Gravity's Rainbow, I was so sick of how thickly meandering the prose sounded to my ears. It was like being slowly clobbered to death with a thesaurus. This is the kind of book your ninth grade Language Arts teacher really wants you to like, but you don't.
Despite how beautifully careful the language is, the novel is downright boring. For the majority of my time reading, very little actually happens. The characters all live inside their own heads, and so the story must also. This means words, words, words, an endless river of words, but very little action. Kind of like reading Twitter.
The real problem for me, I think, was that there was nothing to relate to in the novel. Out of literally dozens of characters, there wasn't a single one I liked. At no point did I feel any kinship with, or curiosity for, or emotional investment in anyone. Very little time was spent on any individual character, and the result was that they all seemed like flat NPCs, even hours the book! This meant that the whole thing was oozing in whimsy, but devoid of any real charisma or drama. Slothrop and Mexico and Pointsman are all wildly unique personalities, which serves as an initial hook -- but they could have disappeared, or died, or succumbed to their own vices at any time, and I would have felt nothing. I didn't care in the slightest these people were happy.
At some point I had to ask myself -- why am I reading this book? The only good answer I could come up with was, "because it's popular and appears intellectual." Seriously. It felt like the kind of book that a sophisticated person would read, and so I picked it up. But I didn't derive any meaning or enjoyment from it, and so I put it down. I guess that means I'm not an intellectual after all.
Plus, my loan on it from the library was rapidly running out.