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A review by cameronbcook
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
5.0
NOTE: No spoilers for Gravity's Rainbow or Twin Peaks: The Return in this review
On September 3, 2017, Showtime aired the final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, described by its writer and director, David Lynch, as "an 18-hour film, not a television show." The distinction between film and TV used to be more divided than it is now. TV was where stars came from, not where stars went. Now, TV and film are more interchangeable. If anything, TV is the prestige world of the auteur, while movies are theme park rides reserved for massively-expensive, unending serial adventures--the former mode of the primetime soap expanded to studio-destroying budgets and high-stakes opening weekends.
Lynch's distinction between television and movies reflects his age. When he made seasons one and two of Twin Peaks, the show clearly had disdain for television shows. To hammer home his point, Lynch opened Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the film prequel to the series, with the image of a TV being smashed to pieces by an axe. Lynch used the medium of TV because it was the vessel in which his massive story would fit, but he didn't love the idea of making a TV show, the art of the masses. I'm simplifying this distinction, but not by much.
The final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return were aired on the same night in a two-hour time slot. The same time slot length as a film for a premium cable channel. The first hour was the finale of the show. The second hour was something stranger. Something seemingly unique, wholly, to all of television. He had time. He had an eighteenth hour.
When I sat down to read Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, I had already read V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Inherent Vice. I'd been afraid to read Gravity's Rainbow because of its reputation. The other three books had been fun, lightly mind-bending, mostly procedural detective novels, but GR's reputation was somehow more stately, or at least more foreboding, than the other Pynchon novels I'd had the courage to read.
Like Twin Peaks: The Return, it begins by telling you the ending, not unlike many other confident works of fiction (Citizen Kane, Dracula, Sunset Blvd, Lawrence of Arabia), but it also tells you what the novel's purpose is.
A V2 rocket is falling from somewhere. You (we? us?) are in a movie theater. Eventually, that rocket will land on the movie theater and kill everybody inside. While we wait for that to happen, we are watching a film. The film is then explained in great detail. That film is Gravity's Rainbow.
Enjoy the show.
What follows is what would eventually have to be a film of at least eighteen hours in length. Pynchon has written a novel that is actually a film. Like David Lynch half a century later, he has taken a less respectable medium (in Pynchon's case, the movie) and used a different medium with which to explain it. Why not just make a film? Because this is an impossible film to make. Not only would it be impossibly expensive and over twenty hours long, but the imagery would probably be illegal to film, too, considering all it contains. Like David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, Gravity's Rainbow is both of and outside of itself. It's a parody of what it wants to be.
People who know me know I am irrationally invested in not only Twin Peaks, but also the idea that art can be anything it wants to be, at any time it wants to be it. Any work of art that changes right in front of you like a Rorschach ink-blot moving and becoming shapes you can't quite make out, is a work of art I'm interested in exploring. As I read through Gravity's Rainbow, much like my first viewing of Twin Peaks: The Return, or my first read of James Joyce's Ulysses, all I could really think was: "I can't wait to do this again." Sure, the first reading is important, you have to do it, but this novel so clearly works better on a second reading that I found myself reading and rereading large sections of the book. I found myself reading a chapter and then listening to that chapter in the audiobook. It's begging to be experienced over and over again.
What Pynchon has created is a series of puzzles inside puzzles, all delivered in cartoonishly bizarre, paranoid characters paraded in front of the reader like an episode of SNL. The first hundred pages of the book are little more than an overture, laying out the hundreds of characters and locations you are supposed to only half-remember like you've dreamed them. It's overwhelming and exhausting and frustrating to start the novel because you know it's only the first time you've read it. It's the starting level of an enormous open-world game you know you won't even have bearings for for another ten hours. You only know enough to know you don't know enough.
Starting with part 2, however, Pynchon starts to loosen the leash. Or maybe you just get used to what's happening. Characters return. They round out. Scenes lengthen. Plots emerge and converge. You realize it's a book about everything. Science, religion, war, peace. You realize it's funny, funnier maybe than anything you've ever read. You realize it's a musical (there are hundreds of songs), it's a creature feature (one of the main characters is an octopus), it's a love story (the cosmic power of love literally affects the physics of rockets).
The film you're watching is multilingual, cross-generational, prophetic of the twenty-first century, composed of beautiful sentences of incomprehensible genius, composed of sequences filthier than anything else you've ever read.
In the last two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch laid down his thesis statement for endings: in the first hour, he told us how it ends. In the second hour, he told us how it never ends.
Pynchon does the same in Gravity's Rainbow. He starts off by telling us this is fiction, that this is silly, that we are not here, that nothing is about to matter, and then spends seven hundred pages telling us about it.
When Twin Peaks: The Return ended, I said, alone and out loud, "I have to watch that again right now". I said the same thing when I read the last two pages of Gravity's Rainbow.
The novel is nestled nicely in my five favorite novels of all time, and it will only get better on additional readings.
On September 3, 2017, Showtime aired the final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, described by its writer and director, David Lynch, as "an 18-hour film, not a television show." The distinction between film and TV used to be more divided than it is now. TV was where stars came from, not where stars went. Now, TV and film are more interchangeable. If anything, TV is the prestige world of the auteur, while movies are theme park rides reserved for massively-expensive, unending serial adventures--the former mode of the primetime soap expanded to studio-destroying budgets and high-stakes opening weekends.
Lynch's distinction between television and movies reflects his age. When he made seasons one and two of Twin Peaks, the show clearly had disdain for television shows. To hammer home his point, Lynch opened Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the film prequel to the series, with the image of a TV being smashed to pieces by an axe. Lynch used the medium of TV because it was the vessel in which his massive story would fit, but he didn't love the idea of making a TV show, the art of the masses. I'm simplifying this distinction, but not by much.
The final two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return were aired on the same night in a two-hour time slot. The same time slot length as a film for a premium cable channel. The first hour was the finale of the show. The second hour was something stranger. Something seemingly unique, wholly, to all of television. He had time. He had an eighteenth hour.
When I sat down to read Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, I had already read V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Inherent Vice. I'd been afraid to read Gravity's Rainbow because of its reputation. The other three books had been fun, lightly mind-bending, mostly procedural detective novels, but GR's reputation was somehow more stately, or at least more foreboding, than the other Pynchon novels I'd had the courage to read.
Like Twin Peaks: The Return, it begins by telling you the ending, not unlike many other confident works of fiction (Citizen Kane, Dracula, Sunset Blvd, Lawrence of Arabia), but it also tells you what the novel's purpose is.
A V2 rocket is falling from somewhere. You (we? us?) are in a movie theater. Eventually, that rocket will land on the movie theater and kill everybody inside. While we wait for that to happen, we are watching a film. The film is then explained in great detail. That film is Gravity's Rainbow.
Enjoy the show.
What follows is what would eventually have to be a film of at least eighteen hours in length. Pynchon has written a novel that is actually a film. Like David Lynch half a century later, he has taken a less respectable medium (in Pynchon's case, the movie) and used a different medium with which to explain it. Why not just make a film? Because this is an impossible film to make. Not only would it be impossibly expensive and over twenty hours long, but the imagery would probably be illegal to film, too, considering all it contains. Like David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, Gravity's Rainbow is both of and outside of itself. It's a parody of what it wants to be.
People who know me know I am irrationally invested in not only Twin Peaks, but also the idea that art can be anything it wants to be, at any time it wants to be it. Any work of art that changes right in front of you like a Rorschach ink-blot moving and becoming shapes you can't quite make out, is a work of art I'm interested in exploring. As I read through Gravity's Rainbow, much like my first viewing of Twin Peaks: The Return, or my first read of James Joyce's Ulysses, all I could really think was: "I can't wait to do this again." Sure, the first reading is important, you have to do it, but this novel so clearly works better on a second reading that I found myself reading and rereading large sections of the book. I found myself reading a chapter and then listening to that chapter in the audiobook. It's begging to be experienced over and over again.
What Pynchon has created is a series of puzzles inside puzzles, all delivered in cartoonishly bizarre, paranoid characters paraded in front of the reader like an episode of SNL. The first hundred pages of the book are little more than an overture, laying out the hundreds of characters and locations you are supposed to only half-remember like you've dreamed them. It's overwhelming and exhausting and frustrating to start the novel because you know it's only the first time you've read it. It's the starting level of an enormous open-world game you know you won't even have bearings for for another ten hours. You only know enough to know you don't know enough.
Starting with part 2, however, Pynchon starts to loosen the leash. Or maybe you just get used to what's happening. Characters return. They round out. Scenes lengthen. Plots emerge and converge. You realize it's a book about everything. Science, religion, war, peace. You realize it's funny, funnier maybe than anything you've ever read. You realize it's a musical (there are hundreds of songs), it's a creature feature (one of the main characters is an octopus), it's a love story (the cosmic power of love literally affects the physics of rockets).
The film you're watching is multilingual, cross-generational, prophetic of the twenty-first century, composed of beautiful sentences of incomprehensible genius, composed of sequences filthier than anything else you've ever read.
In the last two episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch laid down his thesis statement for endings: in the first hour, he told us how it ends. In the second hour, he told us how it never ends.
Pynchon does the same in Gravity's Rainbow. He starts off by telling us this is fiction, that this is silly, that we are not here, that nothing is about to matter, and then spends seven hundred pages telling us about it.
When Twin Peaks: The Return ended, I said, alone and out loud, "I have to watch that again right now". I said the same thing when I read the last two pages of Gravity's Rainbow.
The novel is nestled nicely in my five favorite novels of all time, and it will only get better on additional readings.