February 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow. A controversial literary sensation when it was published—it was infamously snubbed by Pulitzer higher-ups, despite unanimous recommendation from the fiction jury—the novel has since gathered a daunting reputation. Like Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow is the kind of book people pretend to read to appear smart while riding the bus. A New York magazine critic once dubbed it “perhaps the least-read must-read in American history.”
This reputation does an obvious disservice to the book itself, and to a potential audience of curious readers. The time to pick up Gravity’s Rainbow is now. It is at once a busy almanac of its era and a sort of field guide for our own. It echoes eerily in the new-ish millennium. In a way, our own age’s greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping death tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has finally, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are still living under Gravity’s Rainbow.
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