Currently Reading: Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

Nobody can praise Thomas Pynchon anymore without addressing a scathing article by James Wood that appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic. In “The Smallness of the ‘Big’ Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman,” Wood blasted everyone from Pynchon and Don DeLillo to Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace for pursuing a sort of sprawling, overly researched novel that “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.” Wood seemed to believe these novels were destroying the literary arts, and his critique is especially appropriate for Gravity’s Rainbow: the novel employs dense scientific language and an ensemble of thinly drawn characters, with impossible names like Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice and Lt. Oliver (“Tantivy”) Mucker-Maffick.

Still, Gravity’s Rainbow was named the best novel of the 1970s by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and its blend of historical facts and hyperactive prose has been an inspiration to a generation of highly regarded writers including—who else—Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace. So why the controversy?

The following paragraph will illuminate.

"He’d got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq, restricted to quarters after sundown—98% venereal rate anyway—one sunburned, scroungy unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time—even so there had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by."

For me this whole paragraph is a set-up for a punchline at the end. Pynchon runs squarely at the depressing details of Pirate’s experience, elaborating on all the filth and particular tortures of his daily life, making it as hard to keep on reading as it is to look away. And finally, teasing us with the promise of an “even so,” Pynchon takes all of these horrible details and piles them on a character’s conscience, letting us know that Pirate is aware—but dimly—of how pathetic he is.

What Wood described as an emerging style of “hysterical realism,” is often, with Pynchon, an elaborate set-up for characterization. By building these structures and tearing them down, Pynchon is revealing a bias against so-called “hysterical realism”: his goal is to undermine the accumulated weight of his details and reveal his characters’ humanity. In that sense he’s like Joseph Heller, who suffused Catch-22 with frustrating irrationalities, only to show that his main character, by contrast, was utterly sane.

Unfortunately, a subsequent generation of writers has decided to repeat Pynchon’s joke without using the punchline. Authors like Davide Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are winning priase for enormous novels in which the delivery of accurate information about the world is the main narrative force. Such authors live up to James Wood’s worst fears about “hysterical realism.” I wish they would go back and study the way Pynchon frustrates his own splendid details Gravity’s Rainbow.