Evan’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Pynchon's ravings here at near the halfway point have gotten so digressive and maximalist; literally everything that pops into his head goes onto the page and I guess I'm just going to ride this thing like a mismatched array of riptides and cross currents and chaotic waves to the shoreline if they take me there. The beauty of the writing keeps me grounded enough. That's all for now.

This ballooning episode with Slothrop also in disguise as a reporter reminds me that I, too, back in the 1980s, took a hot-air balloon ride over the city when I was a newspaper reporter. Sometimes I forget I've done some things.

We encounter Marvy the racist and a black rocket commando and a gal who might be a witch, and too young for these sorts of things. Page 300. Pynchon is no more crazy in his tales than DFW, but a much more meticulous writer. Proceeding.

Section 2 of Gravity's Rainbow complete. Every sentence brims with wisdom. Really helps to be a reader who's a generalist -- reading across the disciplines of history, pop culture and literature. As I do that anyway, it's good prep.

You definitely have to be keyed into a particular frequency to appreciate this book, and luckily I finally got there. Pynchon is using this rather funny espionage tale with Slothrop to outline political history in ways that are eerily prescient and timeless; sumbitch predicted EVERYTHING. Slopthrop just bumbling around Europe with Brit intel completely failing at tracking him is pretty hilarious. Eagerly onward.

I guess one of the biggest jokes in the lit community is if someone is reading Gravity's Rainbow they will sure as hell make sure you know about it. I'm not immune to this. I told someone at the bookstore today and she perked up and seemed interested. But how do you explain this maximalist thing in two sentences? I tried.

A bit of a blessing that one of my favorite TV shows of all time is Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner because there are lots of parallels here. Whether Pynchon is bouncing back and forth in time and place and memory or between the real, the psychological and metaphysical worlds, I've found this to be surprisingly focused and manageable. New characters are introduced judiciously, not confusingly. Kind of enjoying it.

“I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday -- that They'll come out ... and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level--and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive...”
Preach it, TP.