Five Books I Should've Liked But Didn't: Book Three

Okay, we've reached the halfway point in my series of Books I Should've Liked But Didn't. So far I've tossed aside two genre icons. Today I throw out a Modern Classic.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. Picaresque, edgy, sweeping, different, odd, rockets and erections -- this novel had it all. As my plane taxied down the runway and ascended into the heavens, I opened this huge book to page one and settled back ready to lose myself in hours of uninterrupted reading bliss. I read the first pages, didn't get it, then I re-read the first pages, still didn't get it, then I flipped around to see where this was going, I still didn't get it, and then I started over again. A throbbing sensation in my head overcame me as I realized I was imprisoned for five more hours in a small metal tube hurtling through space with a book I couldn't read. Not having brought another book with me, I spent the rest of the long flight ruminating unfavorably on Pynchon and resolving to always double-book in the future.

So what went wrong? I was in college and fancied myself a Serious Reader. What is the point of being a Serious Reader if one doesn't tackle Difficult Books? Also, being shallow and pretentious, I thought toting around a Pynchon book was just the ticket I needed to earn my Lit Cred. So, I picked up the book for all the wrong reasons.

I was also completely unprepared for it. I didn't appreciate the symbolism, I didn't get most of the allusions, I didn't understand the structure (or lack thereof). In short, I was unwilling (or unable) to do the work needed to understand the book. I just wanted a good read.

My brief encounter with Gravity's Rainbow was enough to send my literary ambitions crashing to the ground, searing me for decades afterwards. I no longer considered myself a Serious Reader, which was probably a good thing, I retreated to comfort books by P.G. Wodehouse and Georges Simenon, which was probably a good thing too, I lost confidence in my ability to tackle really tough books, which was a mixed blessing, and I remained shallow and pretentious, which was a bad thing.

I've since discussed my experience with Gravity's Rainbow with a number of people. Most had experiences similar to mine -- those who tried to read it on their own gave up, those who read it in an English seminar worked their way through it without really understanding it. Those who like it seem to treat it not as a book but instead as a code that can never be completely deciphered, a puzzle that can never be finished. They seem to relish the challenge of uncovering each allusion, of connecting each symbol, of figuring out why his erections attract V-2s.

Even its reviewers seemed to have had difficulty with it. Richard Locke, in his rave review of the book for The New York Times Book Review, nevertheless referred to it as "bonecrushingly dense" and "grindingly dull" and observed:

Reading it is often profoundly exasperating; the book is too long and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes, one's dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration.

The quick folks at Book-a-Minute Classics, my other source for book reviews, offset the endless sprawl of Gravity's Rainbow with an ultra-condensed review that reads, in its entirety, as follows:

A screaming thing comes across the sky. It's a V-2 rocket carrying twelve thousand pounds of symbolism, and it's coming down on your poor, deluded, postmodern head.

I recently peeked at Steven C. Weisenburger's A "Gravity's Rainbow" Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel, a line-by-line guide to Pynchon's book that Amazon.com's readers believe is essential if one is to even begin to comprehend it. While pondering the issue of whether art can be art if art can't be comprehended on its own but instead needs the assistance of an obsessively-researched guidebook in order to make any sense, my eye settled on the following entry discussing the term "Brennschluss":

Available to Pynchon from a variety of his technical source books, but most notably Dornberger [9n], who explains: "Brennschluss, the 'end of burning'; the German word is preferred to the form 'all-burnt,' which is used in England, because at Brennschluss considerable quantities of fuel may still be left in the tanks." In the V-2 this stage occurred at an altitude of 20 kilometers (12.3 miles).

Actually, I prefer "all-burnt" to "Brennschluss," for my trip with Gravity's Rainbow left me burned out and my tank on empty.

Our series of Books I Should've Liked But Didn't is hurtling towards completion, having passed its apex and begun its rapid descent in a tight downward spiral. Watch for explosions tomorrow as we target another genre stalwart that I should've liked, but didn't.

Comments

[stephenesque]

These are goods posts, I think, good subject ...
Start over with Pynchon... and begin with the "Crying of Lot 49". Brilliant stuff, I think.
BTW - that single, final blog post thing on that other site was very funny. Blog Dada-ism

[Enoch Soames]

Don't listen to SB...you really need no postmodern pooh...

[stephenesque]

C'mon Soames. We all need a little post-modern poo in our lives.

[Outer Life]

I neglected to mention a few things in the post, one of which is that I came to Gravity's Rainbow after reading (and enjoying, although not, I fear, really understanding) The Crying of Lot 49.

Another is that I've always intensely admired Pynchon for shunning the spotlight in the Age of the Celebrity Writer. I was therefore willing to cut this recluse a great deal of slack when I opened the book.

Finally, I had written a bracketed sentence at the end that got lost somewhere. The sentence read something like "[Among the five books I didn't like, this is the only one that I can ever see myself opening again.]" I doubt I ever will, but I can't deny the book has a certain charm.

Sometimes I hear it calling out to me like Everest must have called out to Hillary.

[Enoch Soames]

Yes, it called Mallory as well, and look what happened to him...