Gravity's Rainbow is a theory in physics that predicts light, due to different wavelengths experiencing slightly different gravity levels, will be split like a prism when travelling near heavy objects like Black Holes. It arose to try to solve disparities between quantum theory and general relativity. Scientists are trying to detect rainbow gravity using the Large Hadron Collider. If true, it will disprove the Big Bang, a distasteful and unimaginative universe creation theory that creates more questions and problems than it solves.
I was looking around for science fiction books and found one that I thought was about Gravity's Rainbow. That's the title, and it was written by Thomas Pynchon, a science fiction writer. I opened it and found some technical descriptions of rockets with statistics and thought I had something good.
Boy, was I wrong. Picking random books because the title is the same as a subject I'm interested in, cosmology in this case, is not always a good idea. I'm about 300 pages or one third of the way in and it is probably the worst book I have ever read, with Zelda Fitzgerald's sole novel being the worst. If one word describes my impression of the book, it’s irritation. It’s one of those post-modernist intellectual disembodied voices books.
The opening pages made me nauseous. They were about somebody who likes to cook with bananas. He grew them in a hothouse on the roof of his apartment building in London during the Blitz. This section was full of descriptions of banana dishes and recipes. People were drinking liquified banana drinks. I don’t like bananas, especially not the cardboard-tasting CAvandish variety which plague Western supermarkets. The last time I bought some, I left them in my backpack, and by the time I remembered them, they had turned into a foul-smelling black liquid. That’s all I could think of while wading through the opening.
It’s mostly about a guy in WWII in England in a town that is being bombarded by V2 rockets, and Pinchot spends the majority of the book writing about his erections. Although I won’t finish, I suspect most of the novel’s symbolism is phallic: bananas, rockets (he describes the rocket as the world’s largest phallus) . Then he fills most of it with pointless jokes about octopusses, toilets, and sex acts.
t’s full of dirty lymerics that might be funny if you’re high. It might be funny as a drunken barroom conversation, but it’s the lowbrow kind of thing that isn’t funny any place other than at a bar while drunk. Even South Park is funnier.
Also there are lots of references to popular 1960s New Age beliefs. Mentions Ouspensky at least 100 times pfft. It’s also full of technical descriptions of rockets and statistics. He spends a lot of time showing off his knowledge of random facts. I can imagine that many of the references might make the book more difficult for anybody who does not already have a solid background of science, mathematics, history, and culture, but I have multiple university degrees, and to me it just comes across as a mess of random and unsolicited facts. Some writers are good at bringing out random facts and mini-lectures, but Pynchon is not one of them. It only makes him more boring.
The impression throughout the book is of listening to hundreds of disembodied voices. Like many books nowadays, there is not one fully developed scene, setting, or character sketch. He doesn’t bother introducing any of his 100 or so characters and their voices just end up talking over each other. The reader is left to wonder which characters are speakign and when. More confusing, some of the characters are the same person. The reader is burdened with the task of figuring out that himself for 900 pages by doing the reading equivalent of listening in on random conversations by unseen speakers while locked in a prison cell.
In general, post modernist literature does away with plot structure and any traditional elements of the novel. This is bad, because these things are needed to tell a good story. Otherwise, it just ends up being an incoherent mess. The author probably thinks of it as a puzzle he has created that the reader needs to solve. I like puzzles, but not all puzzles are worth solving. The puzzles and the toilet humor are probably why a lot of people like this one.
But it’s the author’s own voice, and he expects the reader to “sit at the author’s feet while he pontificates.” Pinchot is a pantload.
If you want to read stream of consciousness,, read “The Sound and the Fury” or Ulysses. I liked the former and hated the latter, but at least both were well-written. I had to read each twice to get a basic understanding of each of them.
I’m upset at having wasted several hours on this load of crap.
Post modernism in literature has produced a few interesting things, but this one was not one of them. By challengign the structure of the traditional novel, Pinchon transforms it into a personal monologue. It is a 900 page blog written in the 1960s before the invention of blogs. I understand that Pinchot can write something worth reading when he sticks to a standard form of writing a story, but this was obviously not what he did in this novel. He cannot pull off the postmodern style.
Bottom line: AVOID
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I'm also reading "This side of Paradise," "the Book of Tea," "Big Daddy," "the Master and Marguerita," "teh Age of Innocence," "the end of hte Red Citizen," "Critique of Pure Reason" (Kant had good ideas but he the writing ability of a ten year old. The book is riddled with his ten page long sentences. Good writers did not do that in the year 1600, and they don't do that now.) and "le Grand Meaulnes." I like all of them so far, but some are more entertaining than others which is why I skip around between titles.
