I just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and it is, for me, a page-turner. This doesn’t mean I understood the novel, but the images running through each page or paragraph are appealing. Pynchon and his book very much belong in the world of literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s hip in that old-style jazz Hipster mode; this fractured narration takes place at the end of World War II, which was the height of Bebop Jazz and its hipsters. Although I faintly recall that the name Charlie Parker is mentioned somewhere in the novel, it is more of a reflection of Bop jazz, in which it takes a melody and transforms it into something else. And I believe Pynchon is doing something similar to the text by juxtapositioning pop culture with the essence of a missile that brings death. If the novel has a main character, it is not the famous Tyrone Slothrop but the V2 Missile. Although it doesn’t live, it is the object that is the primary concern and how one reflects on such a piece of extraordinary machinery. The V2 Missle resembles the mysterious Harry Lime or Clare Quilty in Lolita. Both are ghost-like figures in their books, and the missile is very much in that same category, as a mysterious presence that no one wants to see face-to-face because that would be death.
Tyrone Slothrop is not exactly a name that rolls out of the mouth like James Bond. Slothrop, according to my assistant AI, is a combination of the word sloth, meaning laziness, and the word prop, perhaps exposing a theatrical or artificial person. Or artificially as an aesthetic or choice, and at times, one can feel that Mr. Slothrop is an actor in a film, perhaps in his mind. The adventure never stops in GR, and it resembles a movie serial of the 1940s or the illogical adventures of Fantomas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre.
As I read the novel, I immediately thought of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch because it’s a book full of sketches, and GR resembles or shares that sense of humor, but also the boy’s adventure tales such as The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew books. Pynchon is stewing a big pot of soup, and many ingredients go into this soup. Besides Burroughs/Hardy Boys, there is also the fiction of Terry Southern, the absurdity and love of pop culture like Boris Vian, and even traces of Raymond Roussel’s great Impressions of Africa. The one thing that stands out is Pynchon’s knowledge of science and rockets, which is placed as the foundation. On top of that is German silent cinema (Fritz Lang) with some appearances of the German composers Webern and Berg, among others.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a big scary book, but there is nothing to be scared of as a reader here. Pynchon is popular because I think he can connect to those who are scientific or even magick-based method magick-based. The sexual aspect of all of this is also understandable. So the reader has that foundation in place, and then all one has to do is buckle up and become a passenger in Pynchon’s car, or more like it - his rocket.