Over the last few days, instead of doom-scrolling the news each morning, I have been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
The book has a reputation for being grotesque, absurd and nonsensical, a reputation partly deserved; but that’s the point, its reputation underscores its sheer exuberance, black humour and mind-bending narration, narration which jumps, with dizzying alacrity, between orgies, ballistic equations, pig festivals, love triangles, not-quite-disappeared ghosts, and disabused revolutionary light-bulbs.
All whilst following the quest of Tyrone Slothrop, a sort of womanizing Forrest Gump, as he wanders through the detritus of 1945 central Europe, followed by shadowy secret services, but avoiding every pothole, crumbling wall and castration attempt, whilst fucking every woman and girl he comes across. All this as he quests for the S-Gerät, part of the V2 bomb, serial number 00000.
Gravity’s Rainbow may be grotesque, absurd and nonsensical, but less so than the news, and far more entertaining.
Here are a few extracts from the pages I read this morning: ‘Trump’ and ‘Hegseth’ have been inserted instead of the characters named in the book – otherwise, verbatim.
“He’s looking into a room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and-water, a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it’s [Trump’s] entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished table, over the polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet down the waxed surface […] “...(p 648)
…”[Trump] has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny tables, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit this is happening, you know, in a world that really touches, at too many points, the one they are accustomed to…” (p649)
“One of Blodgett Waxwing’s [a mob character] apache lieutenants shows up with his girl, who’s not walking so much as dancing, very fluid and slow, a dance in which [Hegseth], popping out of the kitchen now with his shirt off (and a Porky Pig tattoo on his stomach? How long has [Hegseth] had that?) correctly identifies the influence of heroin. […] ‘That’s exactly it,’ [Hegseth] screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide alarming grin, ‘They’re the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements.’ ” (p651)
And, leaving pissing presidents and shirtless secretaries or war (or health?), how about phony wars that don’t speak their genocidal name?
“The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it’s said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could eliminate them completely?” (p658)
At least reading this in a novel, rather than in newspapers, I can pretend it’s fiction, I can retreat from absurdity and darkness when I close the book.
And here is a link to another recent blog post where the writer, John Hogan, also finds relief in the absurdities of Gravity’s Rainbow.
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Pynchon, Thomas (1973) Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Books (2006 edition)
Richard Shearmur 