Novel by Thomas Pynchon
As a baby, Tyrone Slothrop was used as a subject in stimulus-response experiment. The experiment results in Slothrop (now an American soldier serving in London during World War II) becoming a human predictor of where the feared German rockets will strike next. If this sounds weird, it is, but it's just one element of Thomas Pynchon's third and most famous novel.
Either you LOVE this novel or you don't get it. There's no middle ground.
It won the National Book Award in 1974. It also earned itself third place on the American Book Review's ABR's 100 Best Books.
Falls under the category of Books that will induce a mindfuck.
Last Updated 12.05.02
Malcolm was a street hustler and shoeshine boy in Roxbury and Back Bay before moving to Harlem. While in Roxbury, he was known amongst his peers as Detroit Red (I don't know why he was called Detroit Red, when he moved to Roxbury from Lansing, and didn't live in Detroit until after he was released from prison). Pynchon even mentions in the book that his name is Malcolm ("slip me the talcum, Malcolm!" is the line, I think).
I finished this book. A friend dared me too, so my literary pride was at stake. It helped that I was on a journey by air halfway around the world when I was halfway through. I was slowing down, but this gave me enough time with nothing better to do but finish the bloody thing.
When I got to the description of a lightbulb that took up several pages I became sure that Thomas Pynchon was just trying to fill up space. I'm sure that as descriptions of lightbulbs go, it's a shining light. But it does not serve to advance the story in any way. Story? There may be a story in here somewhere struggling to get out. This is literature, we don't need no steenkin' plot.
As ErisDiscordia says, Gravity's Rainbow is like an LSD trip: it start of mostly normal, gets wilder and crazier, heading off in all directions, constantly novel, but after five or six hours of this you just feel tired of the constant distractions and start to wonder when it is going to end. And then it peters out inconclusively.
The name Gravity's Rainbow refers to the parabolic path of a rocket trajectory influenced by the gravitational force of earth.
In World War Two, V2 rockets were launched towards England from stations in locations around Europe. A shining vapor trail was left behind by the rocket in the sky, with one end anchored in Europe and the other at the point of destruction where the rocket exploded. This metaphor is just an example of how Pynchon shows the beauty and elegant mathematical equations of technology which was designed by man for the ugly purpose of terror and destruction.
Gravity's Rainbow is most likely the most metaphor- and meaning- saturated book of the 20th century (next to Ulysses). I'd like to give a brief introduction to its style. Just to skim over, here are a few of the motifs/themes/recurring structural elements:
Of course, these are merely some superficial elements. The book is much deeper than that, and even flipping through it gives one spectacular ideas. Incidentally, I didn't think the ending was a downer at all; it's very orgastic.
What did Caesar really whisper to his protege as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them--it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history--at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud--will never admit it. (from Gravity's Rainbow)
It's WW2. A US army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop (sometimes referred to as a 'limey' by the other characters for some reason) sleeps around London. He keeps a chart of his sexual conquests on a map of London, sticking coloured stars at the locations of his fornications. Some bright spark in the government notices that about two to seven days after each of Slothrop's shags, a V-2 rocket hits in the same place. There is a spookily accurate coincidence between Slothrop's map and a map of rocket hits, both governed by the Poisson distribution. A guy called Teddy Bloat sneaks into Slothrop's work cubicle when he's not there, snapping pictures of the map.
Slothrop gets sent off, apparently on some kind of leave, to the coastal Hermann Goering casino with a couple of mates. Relaxing on the beach, he sees a beautiful woman being dragged into the sea by an octopus. He rescues her using a crab handed to him by one of his holidaymates, Teddy Bloat. Paranoia kicks in when he wonders why Bloat conveniently just 'happened' to have the crab with him: Say, where'd you get that crab?. This feeling deepens when his other friend, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, disappears. For some reason, a man turns up who teaches Slothrop German and gives him lots of information for researching rockets. Slothrop discovers the existence of a curiously undocumented rocket, the 00000, and one of its unusual components, the S-Gerät. The S-Gerät is unusual in that it is made out of the erectile plastic Imipolex G, invented by the organic chemist Laszlo Jamf.
Say, where'd you get that crab?
Slothrop flees, escaping into the Zone of post-war Europe; he is now on a Quest for the Rocket. He has a large number of adventures, being chased by some of the other characters, notably Major Duane Marvy and Ned Pointsman. He has a trip in an air balloon, where he has a pie fight with Marvy, tries to steal hash from the grounds of a great conference, and winds up on a boat called the Anubis. He falls overboard, and ambles around for a bit in different costumes (including a Russian army uniform and a pig suit). Slothrop repeatedly has close encounters with Marvy, culminating in one interesting situation where Marvy puts on Slothrop's pig suit and gets his balls cut off.
By this time, a ragtag gang of friends has sprung up to try and rescue Slothrop, who, it transpires, is apparently starting to fragment. Slothrop becomes a superhero, and then finds himself in a street, coming across a fragment of a newspaper article: though he doesn't know it, it's telling us about the Hiroshima bomb. After this, he finally splits up into entities which few are able to hold together into any kind of coherent personality. He is last sighted with certainty on the cover of an album by The Fool.
Now Slothrop is demoted from being the primary storyline, having eluded and escaped the narrative, the launching of the 00000 comes to the fore. It turns out that a psycho called Weissmann, aka Captain Dominus Blicero, has possession of the Rocket, and the S-Gerät is in fact a plastic capsule designed to contain a person. Weissmann prepares for launch. He places his sex slave Gottfried into the S-Gerät, bound and silken. The familiar smell of the Imipolex G comforts Gottfried, and he feels the exact moment of brennschluss when the rocket begins to drop. The narrative decouples at the exact moment the 00000 is about to land on a cinema. Inside the cinema, the projector has just broken down and yet on the screen are the words of a hymn by one of Slothrop's ancestors.
"Each will have his personal Rocket."
But the Rocket has to be many things, it must answer to a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch it ... Each will have his personal Rocket.
