Gravity's Rainbow is a picaresque, apocalyptic, absurdist novel that creates a complex mythology to describe our present predicament

Biblioklept

Oct 1

L.E. Sissman's contemporary review of Gravity's Rainbow offers one of the better summaries I've ever read of Thomas Pynchon's enormous novel:

Gravity's Rainbow is a picaresque, apocalyptic, absurdist novel that creates a complex mythology to describe our present predicament. It is supposedly about a brief period in the decline of the West—fall, 1944, through fall, 1945. It is actually about our entire century, from the roots of the First World War through the final calamity, which keeps on threatening right up to press time. Beyond that, it is about the whole modern tendency of man to subordinate himself to the whims of the products of his intelligence, to the self-aggrandizing dictates of machines. It is also about the paranoia this subordination instills in men—a paranoia of which they are absolved as their persecution dreams come true and, ironically, destroy them.

Later in the review, Sissman, a poet, discusses Pynchon's prose:

Pynchon's talent is far greater than mere mimicry, though he is master of that. He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy.

Sissman's review was published in a May 1973 issue of The New Yorker. I think the review would work as a strong introduction for anyone daunted by but interested in reading Gravity's Rainbow.