Gravity's Rainbow | 
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Product Description
"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II."-- Edward Mendelson, The New Republic
Packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.
Amazon.com Review
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky. Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's brief companion to the novel, which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man. Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though. Gravity's Rainbow uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last. --Tim Appelo
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Customer Reviews:
• I Want Those Hours Of My Life Back... 03 August, 2008
This book was a thoroughly juvenile jumble totally lacking in cohesiveness, or -- if you are desperately (and pretentiously) trying to impress someone that you know deep down inside is smarter than you -- it is edgy and groundbreaking (profound and accomplished, if you write reviews for the National Review).
The prose was dense and stumbling. And "dense and stumbling" does not translate into "my mental genius was only able to attain the mystical Pynchon epiphany after purchasing an annotated guide" -- it means that the writing was clumsy, halting, poorly structured, and a royal pain.
"Dense" seems to come up as a compliment in many of the reviews here -- as some sort of self-congratulatory pat on the back for the fact that the reviewer is discerning enough (and lonely enough) to read this book cover to cover multiple times. Oddly enough, I think that "inability to express oneself clearly in writing" is not an overwhelming reference for an author.
The schizophrenic non-linear method of laying the story out is not clever and was not by any means new or groundbreaking when this book came out -- it had been done before, and it had been done well. It was done badly here. In this case, the literary gimmick seemed like an attempt to cover for a shoddy story.
An overwhelming fascination with genitalia does not make a book "edgy". A good fistful of drug references do not make a book "transcendent". If you are unable to derive intense meaning from the randomly strung-together thoughts (being generous here) don't think of it as a personal failing, you've just not been properly hoodwinked into rejecting a belief that good literature ought to be well-written and meaningful.
If you do choose to make the effort to attain the Gravity Rainbow epiphany, you will no doubt be thoroughly rewarded since you could read anything into this load of garbage that you might desire. I fail to see how your time couldn't be better spent reading a good book.
Next time I want to hear a string of profanity-laced nonsense, I'll just tape record a group of intoxicated adolescents.
Kudos to the reviewer who referenced Joyce -- an appropriate shout-out to the trailblazing author who pioneered the technique of using general incoherency to give the finger to pretentious English majors everywhere.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AKX6T5B78SCWW
• Nothing But The Best 28 May, 2008
This is Thomas Pynchon at his finest. Just to read the first several pages is a journey into literary perfection. It may be a tough read, so was Ulysees.
The is a book is worth reading the rest of your life. There are levels at which one exists and when something is playing at a level so far above the normal then one must give it the highest rating.
You have to be very, very well read; this is not Hemingway. If one just reads the first several pages of this book then it is easy to see what an incredible work of art this book truly is.
I have never referred to any book as being near the level of Ulysees, but this one is upon the same playing field. Take it as a challenge, there are reference books to help you. But if you are at the stage where you are thinking of buying this book then you have no choice. Good reading forever.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1W89H4BLWRJQ8
• Mostly Garbage 08 September, 2008
I think reviewing this novel would be more difficult than reading it was, so I'm not going to bother. Here's my bottom line opinion: It is evident from the novel that Pynchon is unquestionably a smart man and more knowledgable about most things than I could ever hope to be, but Gravity's Rainbow is on the whole pretty bad.
If extracted, the mediocre main plot would occupy all of perhaps 200 pages. It might have been somewhat interesting standing on its own. But the other 650+ (!!!) pages of non value adding digression utterly ruins this novel. Occasionally humorous but mostly a tiresome chore to get through. I'm not even sure how I did it. I read it during lunch hour perhaps twice a week, over a period of maybe five or six months. Never got engrossed and only enjoyed what I was reading maybe 5%-10% of the time. But I persevered for two reasons:
1. I'd heard it was the most difficult fiction novel ever and challenging to finish. I wanted to see if I could do it.
2. I'd hoped the plot would improve further in as Slothrop neared his goal.
Ok, so I finished it but was the time spent worth it? Absolutely not, without question. And no, the plot doesn't really improve towards the end.
Don't bother.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2ITEMEL0DTX8A
• Fear And Loathing In Peenemunde 09 June, 2008
This is the mother of all post-modern novels. Much has been said about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; even more written about it since it was published 35 years ago.
There are a myriad of threads running through this novel. I have read Gravity's Rainbow four times in my life thus far; each reading offered something new; something I did not pick up on the last time.
Since Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon has published two other meaty novels:Mason & Dixon: A Novel and Against the Day. And one not so meaty one:Vineland. Each of these novels deserve their own merit; however, it is Gravity's Rainbow parabolic rise to mythic status that changed the course of modern fiction as we know it.
But heck, kids, don't take my word for it. Go on and order yourself a copy of GR and see what all the hub-bub's about, bub. And for the meek there is a companion guide to this novel:A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources And Contexts for Pynchon's Novel. I highly suggest picking up the companion if it's your first time out. Once you read this book you'll want to read it again and again over time. Take my word for it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3K45KMBR2XQF4
• Please Enter A Title For Your Review 24 January, 2008
The majority of this book consists of sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph that don't have any apparent correlation to each other. Even when a few coherent pages rise out of the sea of gibberish neither the characters physical location nor their goals/motivation are clarified, and every time a character recurrs their previous backstory seems to have been forgotten and replaced with a new one.
You'd have to be undeterably invested in liking this book before you started reading it to enjoy it. Even then I can't imagine how you'd manage it but apparently some people have. If you're reading out of casual interest, waiting for the book to hook you in, or even make sense, it's not going to happen.
I could tell pretty early on I wasn't going to enjoy Gravity's Rainbow. The only reason I felt compelled to persevere with it was to try to understand the comparisons to my fave writer David Foster Wallace, but beyond a few obvious homages I can't see anything I like about DFW's writing in Pynchon.
The bit with the dude eating all these gross sweets an old lady is giving him because he wants to be polite was pretty good, part of the 5% of the book that seems to suggest that Pynchon could actually write something engaging if he wanted to. The bit about the Schwarzkommando, a supernatural soldier created by a spell which the casters think failed, who go to Africa and take over colonies, presumably as the sinister beginnings of some world domination, sounds like a great outline for a sci-fi film/novel, but this concept is talked about for like one page and then disappears.
The bit about the light bulb companies and electricity companies in competition and cahoots was interesting too and relevant to DFW's style. Another part of the 5%.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2KEKPMI3WQMPA
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