Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Penguin.

Gravity’s Rainbow has 100 to 150 enjoyable, contiguous pages. The rest of its 760 pages are boring, tedious, and full of nonsense: pseudopsychology and gratuitous drug use and sex. [*] It digresses, it makes your eyeballs itch, and it contains language that is deliberately hard to parse (or was it just never edited?). Finally, it doesn’t have any real point; the story qua story sucks, and there is no message.

It’s been described as unreadable. That’s not quite true, because I’ve basically read it (I skimmed towards the end). It is, however, not worth reading.

I admit that there were some cute moments here and there. Like ten or so. Out of more than six hundred pages of otherwise garbage.

Crap. As I said above, I skimmed the last 200 pages or so. That wasn’t fast enough. I should have just flipped them. I could still claim to have read it. And I would have, I suspect, read more than most self-professed Pynchon fans and the people who couldn’t finish it but were too ashamed - professionally or personally - to admit it.

[*] I am not against drug use or sex in books, or out of them, for that matter. But when they’re pointless they’re pointless. In Gravity’s Rainbow they usually are.

Update: Go read this comic. Read its tool tip. Point well made.