Book Review: Gravity's Rainbow
What makes a book great?
Maybe calling this a “review” is inappropriate because, well, I didn’t make it. I read about 350 pages into Thomas Pynchon’s 770 page novel Gravity’s Rainbow before I waved the white flag.1 Even the word “read” is generous. It’s more accurate to say I looked at 350 pages of GR, to quote Tyler Cowen discussing Hegel.
There were only so many moments of absolute confusion—punctured by the occasional dominatrix, feces gobbling scientist, and rocket-predicting erections—I could take before I was compelled to admit that I simply don’t have what it takes to enjoy this book.
Who does have what it takes? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to meet them. Pointsman’s conditioning of Brigadier General Ernest Pudding started to feel an awful lot like what Pynchon was trying to do to me.
But Gravity’s Rainbow is considered one of the great works of modern literature. It’s a national book award winner, sits on Time’s list of All-Time 100 Greatest Novels, and to quote wikipedia, “is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.” There are, apparently, a great many people who do actually enjoy reading this thing.
So why didn’t I like it? One possibility is that I’m simply not a good enough reader. Reading is a skill, after all. Maybe I entered the big leagues too soon. I thought I was being responsible—I prepared myself with Wallace and Woolf, Joyce and Nabokov. But even Wallace’s Infinite Jest comes nowhere close to the complexity of GR. Each sentence is a misadventure with eight words you’ve never heard of before, and when you get to the end of a page you realize you’re not sure whose perspective you’re reading from anymore, let alone what’s going on in the scene.
Again, maybe this is a skill issue. Or maybe this book is simply meant for people with a much higher IQ than mine. But I confess that I have a hard time believing that anyone is having a good time during their first read through of GR. No matter how good a reader you are, I’m skeptical that you find this enjoyable.
But maybe this doesn’t matter. Maybe a great book can be—or even should be—confusing the first time through? Maybe it should make you wrestle with it, gaining more and more insight and clarity with each read, until finally it clicks into place. Maybe the fact that GR is nearly unreadable at first pass is a feature not a bug.
There’s surely something to this. Crime and Punishment isn’t considered great because it’s easy. It’s considered great because each time you revisit it you can learn something new about the psychology of guilt.
But how far can we push this? Can a book be radically inscrutable at first read and still be considered a masterpiece?
Reading GR (trying to, rather) has made me realize that I don’t have a well-developed theory of literature. What makes a book great? If I had to give you my best theory right now, it would be something like the following: The best book should be stimulating at every level of analysis, giving you endless opportunities for further exploration.
That is, a great book should be interesting on the first pass as just a story. But it should also leave you with near endless opportunities to investigate further, raising questions about the plot or character motivation or ethics or psychology and so on. And you should be able to follow these threads, which in turn lead to even more questions and puzzles. The more you read, the more there is to notice.
Pale Fire is a good example. Nabokov is a beautiful writer, and regardless of whether you’re following the intricacies of the plot the first time you pick it up, it’s fun. The main poem is magnificent and it’s fun to realize that the narrator is a maniac. But once you’ve finished it, you realize you’ve stepped into a game of 14 dimensional chess. What actually happened? Who is real? Who is lying? One layer of mystery gives way to the next, and there are always hints waiting for you in the writing, leading you onwards.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is, in my view, an even better example. Modulo some difficult writing, the story is both hilarious and moving on the first pass. Coming to the end of the book you feel like you need to go right back to the beginning to start working out what actually happened. There are plots and subplots within plots and subplots and entire storylines buried in the footnotes, with just the right amount of detail at each level to help you along the way.
Stoner, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Lolita, and Anna Karenina are more examples that score well by this theory.
I’m undecided about whether it’s possible for fiction to be truly open-ended. Can there actually be an infinite amount to investigate in a novel? Maybe not. But even if not, how much exploration it generates, coupled with how fun and novel and insightful that exploration is, is a useful metric by which to judge a book.
The problem is that this metric can be gamed. What if you just write a really complicated book full of gestures towards intriguing questions replete with hundreds or thousands of arcane references? This can seem like it’s full of insight and rabbit holes, but really it’s just throwing shit at the wall and hoping the audience does enough work on their own to make something out of it.
It’s a fine line. A book needs to offer enough structure to lead you to genuinely new territory, but not so much as to lead you by the hand. This means a bad book can cosplay as a good one by just being sufficiently impenetrable, pretending that a confused reader simply isn’t reading closely enough.
And yeah, sorry, but this is sort of what Gravity’s Rainbow feels like to me. And the conversations I’ve listened to about it since giving up don’t do anything to alleviate my suspicions. They’ll touch on big themes—world wars, paranoia, operant conditioning, fear of death, sadomasochism. Fine, but a great work can’t just list a bunch of interesting topics. What new thing does it say about them? What sort of insight is it offering? Where is the book actually taking you?
When it comes to GR, I have no idea, and quite frankly I’m not sure anyone else does either.
This was another book club pick. You can listen to us optimistically (?) tackle part I here, and then give up here.
Is this what the white visitation meant all along?