Over Christmas I eagerly devoured Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s dense, self-conscious, tortuous, and often obscene — but it’s a fantastic read. If you were to cross Gibson’s talent for brilliant descriptions (“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”) with the rambling, schizophrenic narrative of Catch-22, you’d be on your way to Gravity’s Rainbow:
In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles—bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane—uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying in out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see.
(pp. 132-33 from the 2006 Penguin edition)
Difficult though it may be, it’s supremely rewarding — and definitely worth a second reading.
2 Comments
Got his latest: Against the Day, for Xmas. I have very fond memories of Gravity’s Rainbow, and most of his other books altho I never took to Mason & Dixon, for some reason.
Enjoy!
Nice! I’ll have to investigate the rest of his work as well.
3 Trackbacks
[...] I’ve also discovered an appetite for Serious Literature… after gorging on Thomas Pynchon at Christmas and chowing down on Infinite Jest (I’m halfway through!), I’ve decided I [...]
[...] and there’s a payoff at the end (though you have to work for it). Contrast this with Pynchon, where each page is satisfying to read but (at least in Gravity’s Rainbow) the end of the [...]
[...] novel, Mason & Dixon. I enjoyed it — though it isn’t as consistently brilliant as Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s much more accessible and tells a more straightforward story. The entire work is written [...]