Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Having finished this last weekend, I have no idea what Pynchon was going for here. Lots of possible theories, each seemingly perfectly plausible, except for the presence of all the others stating their case. It isn't so much that one theory cancels out another, as that I can't decide which one is meant to be primary. Everything is significant and nothing is.

Plotwise, the book is set in the late days of World War 2, and a soldier named Tyrone Slothrop is stationed in England, mostly meeting women and having sex with them. Wherever he has a rendezvous, the location is hit by a V-2 rocket within 10 days, tops. This interests certain parties, and once Slothrop realizes they're aiming to do something with him, takes off across war-torn Germany, stumbling in the general direction of the mysterious "Schwarzgeraet", the rocket with serial number 00000. The sexual escapades continue, but the rockets stop falling, at least.

There's a lot of phallic metaphor and description in this. Big surprise, rockets and whatnot. Katje describes the equations that sends the rocket on the way, the zero point, as the feminine counterpart to the rocket. So the zero that signals liftoff represents a vagina? But the rocket leaves the launch point and the zero behind, and flies off to ultimately destroy itself and its final surroundings. So does that also relate to Nora's search for the Ideology of Zero? How about the image of Frank Poekler seemingly relying on his wife Leni to carry him forward, but he's dragging her down? He worked on the Schwarzgeraet, if anyone is blasting off away from someone it ought to be him.

The idea of the Preterite, the ones left behind or who failed, comes up a lot. The notion that if you speak of a "chosen few", then there must a "damned many". And the many have their own importance, because the successes or notoriety of the few only exist in contrast to the failures of the many. I don't know if that's meant to tie into the idea of They, the ones running everything from somewhere in the shadows, who I assume are not very numerous. That They believe they're significant in that they can control so much, that they've achieved so much, but it only means something because of all the people who can't, but go on with their lives anyway.

The story wanders away from Slothrop for 20, 30, 50 pages for a flashback, or to look in on what another character is up to now. Don't worry, those characters will show up somewhere down the line, as they will turn out to know some other character we've already encountered. Even if they're dead, they may return anyway. Pynchon is nice enough to usually remind us who these people are when they show up for the first time in 200+ pages. Not that Slothrop is much of a protagonist. He's a convenient transport to get us into contact with these other characters. As things near a conclusion, he falls out of the picture, because he isn't really needed, if he ever was. He never has any concrete idea about how anything he's doing is going to fix his situation, to the point you have to wonder if it was ever even his idea to go on the run to begin with.

There's a bit in the first 20 pages about the garden on the roof of Pirate Prentice's place. Years of people trying to garden there or just throwing stuff away had created an excellent growing medium. I thought that was a perfect metaphor for the book. Pynchon throws so much down you can grow any conclusion or meaning you want out of it. Draw whatever you like from it, whatever speaks to you, and there'll be plenty of evidence to support that conclusion.

The style of writing doesn't work for me at all. It might be the exact opposite of the kind of writing I enjoy, actually. Pynchon has paragraphs that go on for 5 or 6 pages, and he spends a lot of time describing things. The setting, clothing, the mechanics of two characters screwing, what everyone is eating for breakfast, etc. He's not content to let the reader's imagination fill in anything, which got tedious fast. The jokes or attempts at humor don't land, the dozens of brief ditties and poems just annoy me (or give me something to skim past quickly). The book could have been 200 pages shorter and I'd still have felt it was massively overwritten and a chore to get through. There are parts of it I found interesting, but they're buried under everything else.

'"That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table."

"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles."

"Aw, shit."'