Send It Up. Watch It Rise. See It Fall.

Reading Gravity's Rainbow in the flooded zone

I’m someone who has been willing, from time to time, to read big, dense, doorstop novels, who even counts some of them among his favorites. Not often; I don’t, in general, read nearly enough, and there are plenty of monumental books that I haven’t read. Of Proust, for example, I’ve only read Swann’s Way. But occasionally, not as often as I ought to, I will climb one of these literary mountains. I few years ago, I read William Gaddis’s JR, and found it hilarious. I’ll go to the mat for James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I love deeply. These are books that aren’t only long, but self-consciously difficult. They aren’t Middlemarch, or Bleak House, important books that are structured in a familiar way and have highly readable styles; they aren’t even War and Peace or The Magic Mountain or Don Quixote or Infinite Jest, which are somewhat less reader-friendly, but where you can still generally tell what is going on. They’re downright hard. I’m not going to pretend for an instant that I make a steady diet of books like these, but I have read some of them, and loved some of them. I’m glad to have had put in the time to read them, and in some cases to read them again. I wish I did it more often.

Well, I recently put in the time to read another one of these famous tomes, one that has been staring at me from the shelf for thirty years, daring me to pick it up again after failing to finish it in my early 20s. The book is Gravity’s Rainbow, and I did not like it. At all. I’m trying to figure out why.

Part of it is probably that it just wasn’t playing my song. There’s a music to prose, a rhythm, and when you can’t synch yourself to it, well, reading becomes a constant struggle. Read Ulysses out loud and, in my experience, it’s delightful even when I’m a bit lost; you can let the music wash over you and enjoy it in that spirit. I had a somewhat similar experience with JR. I never could dance to Pynchon’s herky-jerky syncopation. Then there’s the story itself, which struck me as incredibly repetitive. Over and over, a horny male character meets a sultry Central European woman, has wild kinky sex with her, learns something about rocket fuel, then gets into some fantastical scrape and gets tossed out of a train/boat/balloon/whatever into the arms of another Central European sexpot and off we go again. Famous slapstick incidents—like the novel’s protagonist (assuming the novel has one), Slothrop, going down a toilet in the Roseland ballroom—that I knew were supposed to make me laugh out loud, just didn’t. All of this, though, might just be personal taste.

More important, I think, is that the novel felt to me to be displaced in time, a novel of 1973 plonked down unconvincingly in 1945. A central concern of the book is the points of continuity between America and Nazi Germany—not just in that we hastened to acquire German knowledge of rocketry and the scientists behind it before the Soviets could, or that American and German firms had intertwined commercial interests before and after the war, but in terms of racial ideology. That’s a point of view that could have a lot of resonance to readers today, but to me it felt like something imposed on the consciousness of the novel’s characters, a point Pynchon wanted to make about the era rather than something that reflected the consciousness of the era. Add to that the near-ubiquity of sex and drugs. I’m not delusional enough to think that sexual intercourse actually began in 1963, and I’m aware that LSD was first synthesized just before World War II and that the OSS used a variety of “truth serum” drugs extensively during the war. I don’t confuse cinema’s depiction of the 1940s with reality. Nonetheless, something about the non-stop orgy felt wildly out of tune with the novel’s time and place.

I kept comparing Pynchon’s book in my mind to Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s much simpler but also highly episodic, sex-crazed and often hallucinatory-feeling comic novel about World War II, and the latter just felt so much more emotionally true. I’d normally associate that with greater three-dimensionality in the characters, but the characters in Heller’s novel are as flat and attribute-based as those in Pynchon’s (though, I think, far better differentiated in terms of their voices). Rather, I think it’s that the comic absurdities of Catch-22 are intimately related to the actual experience of war, whereas those of Gravity’s Rainbow feel like they were inspired by late-night acid trips after reading about Peneemünde or watching a bunch of wartime Nazi propaganda films. I think that’s the reason Catch-22 has always been a favorite of actual soldiers, which I don’t think Gravity’s Rainbow has ever been.

But I think the deepest reason why I did not much like Gravity’s Rainbow has to do with its paranoia, the sense that everything is connected, and if you can figure out the key to that connection, you can finally make sense of reality, and how differently that plays now, versus how it played fifty years ago.

I had thought that Pynchon had pretty much exploded the conceit of the paranoid novel in 1966 with The Crying of Lot 49. In that book, slow-building intimations of a secret, hidden reality explode, by the penultimate chapter, into a superfluity of signs. Thurn und Taxis, the behind-the-scenes movers of Western civilization, turn out to be everywhere once you know what to look for—which, paradoxically, makes the grand conspiracy theory considerably less credible than it was when the signs were hard to see. If the signs are so obvious, after all, why hasn’t anyone noticed before? This is the main problem with the paranoid stance in general: the insane privilege it gives to the paranoid consciousness. As I read it, that’s why there is no final reveal in The Crying of Lot 49, because the psychological purpose of paranoia is that illusory privilege; you can’t really ever get to the bottom of things, allow that process to end, without abandoning the ego-flattering conceit of paranoia that you in particular are being watched, that you in particular have found the key. Open the door, and on the other side you’re just like all the other poor slobs. In any event, I’d always enjoyed that book, but I worried that the interpretive lens through which I enjoyed it was idiosyncratic to say the least, and quite possibly entirely contrary to the author’s intentions.

Now, having read Gravity’s Rainbow, I’m less worried about one possible misreading—I’m less worried, specifically, that Pynchon was unequivocally on the side of paranoia. But Gravity’s Rainbow is a comprehensively paranoid book in that it is poised, spiritually, on the horns of a dilemma on one side of which everything is connected, everything means something, and you are at the center of the universe’s attention; while on the other side nothing is connected, nothing means anything, and tomorrow a rocket could explode without warning and kill you and that event would be completely random. It’s really either/or. That’s a dichotomy that I understand troubles lots of people—it has troubled me at certain points in my life—but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for life as it is lived at human scale. And when everyone in the novel lives inside that dichotomy, then nobody is living at human scale. In that sense, nobody in Gravity’s Rainbow is human.

That would have made it hard for me to engage with the novel at any time, though I probably would have had more tolerance for it when I was in my 20s. (Though I note that I couldn’t finish it back then either, not because I found it too hard but because even then I found it kind of boring.) But I think it makes it especially hard for me to engage with it now, because of how the valence of paranoia has changed in the past fifty years. Back in 1973, to be paranoid was to believe (for example) that the dark powers who secretly control American life were behind the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King. Not that their deaths were tragic losses that sent America down a darker trajectory than it might otherwise have followed, nor even that their deaths were the product of dark forces that nobody fully controls but that nonetheless shape American life to the benefit of certain groups and people and the disadvantage of others, but that they were killed by an actual conspiracy by those groups and people. A lot of people believed that, and a lot of mediocre art from the 1970s and thereafter took this paranoid perspective literally, while some much greater art accessed it spiritually. To its credit, Gravity’s Rainbow falls basically in the latter category.

But today, paranoia means believing that a secret cabal of child-molesters runs America’s government, that Covid was deliberately engineered to enable the state to implant microchips in our bodies, and so on, the whole panoply of QAnon-level insanity that has infected America and left America vulnerable to takeover by the most unscrupulous charlatans imaginable. Spiritually, there’s still something to all of those fantastic beliefs; they speak to a sense that the structures of American life have had their democratic character hollowed out and corrupted, and that people have lost the limited control over their destinies that they once had. But in their literal form, those kinds of paranoid fantasies are a cancer destroying the country, whose future, in a very real sense, depends on recovering the middle ground between it’s all connected and nothing means anything. Knowing that made it very hard for me to get into a novel whose essential spiritual premise is that there is no such middle ground.

And it didn’t help any that Gravity’s Rainbow’s method is to “flood the zone” with information that is a mishmash of fact and fiction. So many characters! So many plot threads! So many nuggets of information! So many references! It gets to the point that you can’t see the bushes anymore for all the Easter eggs hidden in them. I can’t say that I lost track because I wasn’t interested in tracking them; what would be fairer to say is that I recognized this method and recoiled from it. This is how people who you don’t want to argue with on the Internet argue. And, not to be paranoid myself, but it’s now a technique that has been self-consciously adopted by the main poisoners of American discourse: flood the zone with shit and no one will know what’s true anymore. And when nobody knows what’s true, then they’ll believe what we tell them, because we’ll tell them the truth they want to believe.

The paranoid style has deep roots in America, and its primary valence has migrated wantonly around the political spectrum. But it has rarely if ever been so promiscuously used as a tool of sheer chaos, to decompose public life rather than to organize it. Reading Gravity’s Rainbow now, I couldn’t stop reflecting on that possibility within the novel itself, that all this seeing that the novel was engaged in, all this business, might itself be a grand distraction, from which we would do well to wake before we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

But of course, the whole point of Gravity’s Rainbow is that you never do hear them. By the time the sound gets to you, you’re already dead.