Gravity's Rainbow: Report of the Scouting Expedition

Every once in a while, I get to feeling a bit guilty about reading mostly children's books - I'm a big Harry Potter fan, for example. Ocassionally this guilt is enough to propel me to buying, and starting, one of those books so beloved of English majors - in this case, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Since I'm only only page 47, with more than 700 more to go, a review might be a bit premature, but I must say that I already find myself deeply annoyed.

The book is considered a postmodernist classic: "The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II," according to the back cover blurb from the New Republic. It was published in 1973, and it is set during that War, or a war a great deal like that War, and the characters are mostly concerned with V-2 rocket bombs.

It's not what I would call a page turner. This pre-review was inspired by a 134 word sentence, ostensibly introducing a building.
They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of air, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some sense, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year.

It's not a book one would want to tackle without an unabridged dictionary handy, not, at least if you didn't max out your GRE verbal - or maybe even if you did - I missed by 20 points I think, and encounter about two new words per page. Some people quite clearly love this stuff. Others, and I might be a bit closer to this camp, think it's only a sort of English major penis envy, a flaccid sort of imitation of string theory for literature majors.

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