I Read Gravity’s Rainbow So You Don’t Have To
Hash pipe I made out of an “emerald” I found in 1973. Imagine spotting that chunk of greenish glass while you’re in a mangrove swamp high on windowpane.
HOBOKEN, MAY 26, 2025. One of my grooviest Sixties moments happened in 1973. I was wandering, acid-addled, through a mangrove swamp on Sugarloaf Key when I spotted an egg-sized emerald poking out of the mud. It turned out to be glass, but still. I made a hash pipe out of it.
My point: the Sixties didn’t end with the Sixties. Gravity’s Rainbow was published in 1973, and it’s a Sixties artefact. It epitomizes the goofball, psychedelic anti-authoritarianism I associate with that era.
When I tried to read Pynchon’s novel a decade ago, I found him too hipper-than-thou, smirky, and his depiction of a world careening out of control seemed dated as my lava lamp. I set the 760-page book aside 100 pages in, thinking:
Come on, Obama’s in charge, things are getting better, we aren’t this crazy.
Last month I gave Pynchon’s opus another shot, if only so I could brag that I’d scaled the three ball-busters of 20th-century literature, Ulysses and Infinite Jest being the others. Now, far from dated, Gravity’s Rainbow strikes me as timeless, a ruthlessly dead-on take on humanity, even more so than Ulysses and Infinite Jest. I finished it thinking:
Oh shit, we are this crazy.
The novel’s MacGuffin is the V2 rocket, invented during World War II by Wernher von Braun, whose allegiance is ruled by expedience. Pynchon populates his tale with a vast cast—German, British, American, African--whose trajectories intersect the V2’s.
The novel has lots of plots within plots, and nested conspiracies too, but there is no Plot, no Conspiracy whose revelation will make everything clear. There are only guys and gals trying to make a buck, fuck, get high, get by in a lawless, violent rubble-scape.
Although grounded in real events—what’s more real than the industrial butchery of World War II?—the narrative is fantastical, trippy. You’re never sure exactly what’s going on. The anti-plot’s anti-hero is Tyrone Slothtrop, whose cock is spookily entangled with the V2 rocket, and who random-walks through post-WWII Europe encountering horrors, marvels, horny ladies.
The vibe of meandering, sexy meaninglessness reminds me of Fellini’s Satyricon and La Dolce Vita. Other counter-culture classics come to mind: Slaughterhouse-5, Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Highway 61 Revisited, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Zap Comix… But none of these hippy favorites matches Gravity’s Rainbow in breadth, depth, sheer razzle-dazzle.
I own this copy of Pynchon’s book, but I read it on Kindle.
The sex makes some readers squirm. A Pulitzer committee awarded Gravity’s Rainbow the fiction prize in 1974, but Pulitzer’s overseers rescinded the prize, declaring the novel “obscene.”
Pynchon renders, with fetishistic glee, sadomasochism, coprophilia, bestiality, pedophilia (Slothrop and a Shirley Temple-ish preteen). In one microcosmic scene, lads and lassies on the good ship Anubis, named after the jackal-headed Egyptian death god, come together in a daisy chain of polymorphous kink.
Far from gratuitous, the sex is essential. Sex, Eros if you want to get fancy, is the irrepressibly upwelling life-force that thwarts Thanatos, our compulsion to self-destruct. Not to mention the descent toward disorder and heat death decreed by the second law of thermodynamics.
In Pynchon’s cosmos, human intercourse, sexual and non-sexual, forces us to become either masters or slaves, dominants or submissives, tops or bottoms. Except hierarchies keep flip-flopping, what goes up must come down. No one’s really on top, no one really knows what’s happening. We’re all bozos on this bus.
It’s typical of Pynchon’s humor that things get worse after WWII ends. War is the force that gives us meaning, and when war wraps up, well, what are all the soldiers, spies and bomb-builders supposed to do?
Thank God for the Cold War! The standoff between the U.S. and USSR threatens us with nuclear annihilation, but it unites us, gives us purpose. And it spurs cool new inventions. H-bombs that make A-bombs look like firecrackers! Pynchon’s book seethes with these sorts of savage ironies.
Gravity’s Rainbow makes a mockery of my Pinker-esque hope that science and more broadly reason—you know, white, male Enlightenment stuff--can save us. The Nazis, those wacky control freaks, are the Enlightenment’s spawn. Science bequeathed us the V2 and Zyklon B, Fat Man and Little Boy. At this very moment, reasonable, science-y men are devising ever-more-clever ways to surveil, enslave and massacre their fellow folk.
In one subplot of Gravity’s Rainbow, scientists inspired by Pavlov’s dog experiments seek methods for controlling humans. The goal is to extinguish free will--if it ever existed--once and for all. Free will only gets us into trouble.
Pynchon thus anticipates our current means of social conditioning, from the iPhone and Instagram to ChatGPT. Just wait until Neuralink, Musk’s brainchild, starts churning out brain chips that actually work!
Riding the wave of Gravity’s Rainbow I kept wondering, Who is this guy, Pynchon? I envision him gobbling speed and acid to sustain the torrent of images, ideas, sentences. But he remains, somehow, in command, even (especially?) when his narrative seems to teeter on the brink of psychosis.
Pynchon has mined (pre-Internet, he had to go to libraries!) humanity’s collective unconscious for info on math, physics, chemistry, philosophy, art, history. Even more incredibly, he assembles the factoids into a tale that make you wince, sigh, leer, gasp, guffaw. Pynchon is a maniacal and yet masterful puppeteer, a literary Pavlov.
He doesn’t just tell you the center cannot hold, he rubs your face in that truth, he dunks you in it, until it becomes inescapable, like a dream from which you can’t awaken. If you do wake up, you realize the dream isn’t a dream, it’s reality. Look at today’s headlines, grok the clownish cruelty of the guys in charge. Har.
Does Pynchon offer hope? Hmm, that’s a tough one. Gravity’s Rainbow, gags aside, is a dark, dark book. Ulysses and Infinite Jest seem mawkish in comparison. Joyce and Wallace take civilization for granted, and their characters love and yearn to be loved. Aww, me too.
It’s hard to relate to Slothrop and other characters, because they keep shapeshifting. By the book’s finale they’re on the verge of disintegrating. Same with what passes for civilization. That’s our fate, Pynchon warns, disintegration, and when we struggle to impose order on the chaos, we amplify the entropy, we rush faster toward our doom. Bummer.
At least Gravity’s Rainbow is funny. We humans are so silly! We can cackle and scream “Yahoo!” as we ride the rocket down.
Will this glum review make me roll my eyes a decade from now, when we’re back on track toward a rational, progressive utopia? Will Gravity’s Rainbow, once again, seem as dated as my lava lamp and hash pipe? Man, I hope so.
Further Reading:
If you like this review, check out Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?, My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever, Henry James, The Ambassadors and the Dithering Hero, The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind, Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox, Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”, Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge.
And if you really like this review, check out my poor, unloved fictionalized memoir Pay Attention.
I only turn on my lava lamp now for special occasions.