To describe any novel is to do it a disservice, and in some cases, you shouldn’t even bother. Thus, having failed on numerous occasions to describe Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s colossal, parabolic wonderland of a novel, I’ve simply stopped trying. Not only because it is essentially unsummarizeable, but because now, 50 years after its release, it still evades our understanding. (The only 20th century novel less penetrable is perhaps Finnegans Wake, and at times, Pynchon gives Joyce a run for his money.) Now, when asked about the book, I simply tell people what they can expect: rocket physics, sex, coprophagia, pedophilia, giant octopuses/adenoids, riffs on thermodynamics, Pavlovian conditioning, speculative chemistry; secret cabals, Nazi-mysticism, drugs, sea shanties, an acid trip of a last chapter, and a whole lot else.
I first read the novel when I was nineteen and was floored by its utter narrative disobedience, its heresies, profanities and Melvillean verbal energy. I remember Ned Pointsman getting his foot lodged in a toilet-bowl while chasing a dog around the rubble of London; a story about a sentient lightbulb named Byron; a pie fight in a hot air balloon; a demented ritual of human sacrifice, a masterfully staged opening scene, and an unforgettable first line. The experience was one of awe and confusion. This is precisely what great novels do: they produce a kind of frisson, which stirs in you for years, until you find yourself pulled, almost orbitally, back into them.
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