The version I am currently reading.

This may be the first in a series of posts about reading books that people want to be seen reading to look cool, but are not conducive to reading with anything but full concentration.  As with most “difficult” books, if you give them enough time, the ebb and flow of the writing will be clearer.  My history with Gravity’s Rainbow (herein referred to as GR) stretches back to 2005 and continues on to inspire this post today.

During this five-year stretch I’ve asked myself whether or not I care to re-enter, let alone finish this book. Despite a love for coffee and beer, I never understood what people called “acquired tastes.” If you don’t like something you don’t like it, so leave it alone.  I guess it’s different with art. I didn’t first perceive Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as a sonic landscape of pure genius (best listened to alone, in a small room, with your eyes closed). It grew on me. However inaccessible some parts of YHF or GR seemed at first, there were overall enough likable moments to keep reeling me back in, and that is usually a sign of good art.

So over the last five years, GR has done a number on me.  Three times I’ve made it in 50 pages.  At some point I got sick of reading the same pages over and over, but something kept bringing me back.  Maybe it was the giant adenoid that a frenzied group of scientists kept applying cocaine to in order to keep it happy.  Or on the third run-through, when I discovered there was a long paragraph told from the point of view of a dog being chased by a mad Pavlovian who wanted to experiment on it.  It was around this time when I figured out how to read Gravity’s Rainbow, probably after a whole year of its first 50 pages. Luckily I’d taken notes this time.

On my fourth approach to the book, thanks to the notes, I started from page 51. It had been about a year since my third foray and I’d almost given up entirely. But I happened upon a serendipitous quote that motivated me to pick up old GR again. For whatever reason, I cannot remember the exact quote or who it is attributed to, but the jist of it was this: big novels are great because they are like good friends. You can spend quality time together, then separate for a while, only to return as if you never left. I think Balzac said it, and my thinking was, if Balzac could take 10 years to read a book, so can I.

It was this same quote that, just yesterday, inspired me to pick up GR for a fifth go. I found it was easier to jump in this time. Within 20 pages of reading, a scientist was fellated (I think by a mental patient) and an octopus attacked a woman on a French beach. It turned out that this was the same octopus acquired by the aforementioned fellated scientist in a scene long before this one, and in fact, this was also the same scientist who went after the dog in wartorn London, and moreover, it was the same scientist who experimented on the decided an/protagonist of the book, Tyrone Slothrop, who is the character that saved the woman from the octopus on the French beach. And holy shit there’s more. The woman on French beach was in a weird Nazi sextape 100 pages prior, and a third character on the beach, I’m proud to say, is a spy from 200 pages back, and may have also been involved in the sextape (I can’t wait to figure it out!). How I know this is in small part credit to my note taking, but more a credit to Pynchon. In making an 800 page book with just as many characters, he certainly makes it navigable. You just have to put in a little work.

I am a pretty lazy person, but reading GR makes working for art fun. Much of this book is about conspiracy, the massive web of the military industrial complex post-WW II and I wouldn’t be surprised if Pynchon meant for this book to be interactive. Part of the fun is figuring out who’s connected to what and how. As Salman Rushdie recently wrote of Pynchon in Tin House, Pynchon sees paranoia as a higher form of consciousness. The paranoid at least have hope that there is an answer to the riddle, a meaning to the world. GR is definitely a riddle and unlocking its secrets can be rewarding. If becoming one of Pynchon’s paranoiacs and losing yourself in the paranoid world of GR sounds at all pleasing to you, here are some tips that I hope will help anyone starting from page 1.

TIPS:

1. Take notes! It’s not as boring as it sounds and you don’t need to be extensive with your records.  Pynchon was kind enough to break the book into relatively small sections, so make note of which characters each section follows. Pay attention to paragraph transitions because you never know when a scene might change within a section. Make note of the change.

2. Take names! Underline not just names, but identifying details of characters. If a scientist is known for wearing a cape, take note of  the cape, because later on he might not be mentioned by name. It also helps to remember the name too. Also, you will find characters only mentioned by he or she in the beginning of a section. Figuring out who is who, and writing their names at the beginning of each section (or shift in paragraph) is an enormous help when you have to flip back a few pages (or a few hundred).

3. More notes! Underline any strange behaviors, as they are usually significant to the plot. You’ll be surprised how obvious some of the serious plot details are.

The version I bought on impulse in Amsterdam.

4. Re-read! You won’t have to re-read every scene, but if something is unclear, go back, slow down, and take your time with it. If it still doesn’t make sense (some of the scientific stuff may daunt you a little) move on, there will soon be some kind of toilet humor or hilarious calamity. Also, when this tip is combined with note taking, it is much easier to flip back through the pages and confirm you’re hypotheses about what the hell is going on.

5. Seriously, move on. You have to know when to roll with the craziness and when to pay attention. The long descriptions tend to be more “irrelevant” than the actions. But do beware of strange details, even in a mass of hallucinatory text.  Sticking with tip two (underling characters at least) can help you understand much more, even if you find yourself skimming.

6. Other resources. I have yet to use these to any great extent, but as for understanding some random old references and keeping track of made-up acronyms, this site is awesome.

END TIPS

So at this point, I’m hoping to finish the book in one swoop. And when I say swoop I mean possibly two months.But I’m chipping away a little each day, and I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t satisfying.  When it stops being enjoyable, I’ll put the book down with the comfort of knowing it will always be on my bookshelf, patiently waiting.