Ted Goia Makes Me Feel Good About Gravity's Rainbow

 I heard of Thomas Pynchon before going to prison. So when I found his books in the Fort Dix FCI  leisure library, I set out to read him. I have been trying to figure out what was the deal ever since.

I subscribe to Ted Gioia's Substack, The Honest Broker, which published Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Turns 50. Unlike me, Mr. Gioia is actually bright, so I wanted to see what he had to say about Pynchon's novel (which I did read, but without a study guide).

Only twice in my life have I a relied on a guidebook to help me make it through a novel. I would have certainly met my doom somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis if, in pursuit of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I had not kept Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s 700 pages of annotations at my side. My other literary survival manual came into play when reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow—here my lifeline was Steve Weisenburger’s guide to the sources and contexts of this 300,000 word behemoth.

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Even from the start, the verdicts were mixed. When a three-member Pulitzer Prize jury recommended that Pynchon’s novel receive the award for fiction, the Pulitzer board over-ruled them—as a result, no fiction award was given out that year. In a strange twist—one that might have surprised even the reclusive author—Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula (those were the days, my friend), a prestigious science fiction award, but lost out to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. When Pynchon’s weighty novel did rack up a big honor, the National Book Award, the author didn’t bother to show up for the ceremony, sending comedian Irwin Corey—famous for his impersonations of a drunk professor—on his behalf.

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"Pynchon creates a world in which some subatomic characteristics of reality are dealt with at the level of everyday life," Professor Kathryn Hume has written, in defense of the sci-fi credentials of Gravity’s Rainbow. "Pseudo-Heisenbergian uncertainty bedevils the main characters, but even more important it constrains the readers." Professor David Ketterer has countered with a diametrically opposed position: "I can testify that [Gravity’s Rainbow] is not a work of SF in any real sense," he writes. "Furthermore in my opinion it is not a particularly good book marred as it is by a kind of elephantiasis…."

So whom do we back in this game of dueling professors? I have no problem acknowledging the sci-fi elements in this book. But, in all fairness, almost everything shows up at some point in this immense novel. I remember hearing locals describe a specific Paris café where, if you waited long enough, anybody you wanted to see would stroll by the sidewalk tables. Gravity’s Rainbow is the literary equivalent. If you keep pushing ahead you will find every possible ingredient—philosophy, poetry, silly songs, puns, equations, pop culture references of various sorts, real and distorted historical events, and the interaction of some 400 characters.

 There is more that I find very relevant to the novel, this I find relevant to my reaction:

In retrospect, Gravity’s Rainbow must be seen as an end-of-an-era work—an ironic verdict given how its most fervent fans embraced it, at the time of its initial release, as a pathway to the literary future. But such disappointed expectations were part and parcel of many things that arrived on our doorstep around the time the promises of the 1960s gave way to the realities of the 1970s. After Gravity's Rainbow, the rules of literary fiction changed again, mostly in ways Pynchon could not have anticipated. Different styles came into ascendancy—minimalism, magical realism, postcolonial fiction, genre mashups of various sorts, trailer park verism—in the years following its publication. In more recent decades, an even more surprising twist, namely the avoidance of almost any sort of ideology (you can call this the Franzen syndrome, if you like), has begun to permeate the world of literary fiction, as more and more novelists focus on plot, character development, pacing and plain old fashioned storytelling.

I am not of the time of Pynchon. That I found Gravity's Rainbow as well as his other novels to be more like shaggy dog stories. Not ordinary ones, mind you, but expertly crafted ones. My reaction to all were pretty much WTF? I had a similar reaction to On the Road, except that one I more clearly understood as capturing a particular time in history. I found in neither anything for my own writing. Your mileage may vary.

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