Rainbow in the Dark

On my recent trip to California, I read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Why?, you may well ask, particularly if you know something about said book. I learned some years ago that long plane trips for business trips are the perfect place to read long books which you feel like you should probably read but suspect will not actually be interesting enough to compel your attention when read in the quiet confines of one’s normal domicile with its competing claims of books you actually look forward to reading. Take said long book on a plane trip, and with no other distractions or possibility of switching to a more compelling book, said book gets read. Then, trip done, book completed, you get that nice feeling of, “Well, at least I'll never have to read that book again.”

My most notable achievement in this regard was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, read two years ago on a trip to a conference in Newfoundland. My summary of that book: On page 531, the book became interesting. It is worth reading, but only if one is the compulsive type who is willing to slog through 530 pages to figure out why one is reading this book.

So, after discovering I would be heading to California this June, I naturally enough started glancing at my bookshelf in search of another long tome I wanted to have read but didn’t want to read. Gravity’s Rainbow won. I knew I didn’t want to read it because I had actually started it once before, but quit somewhere around page 400. I knew I wanted to have read it because I keep seeing it mentioned as one of the Great Books of the late 20th century.

My summary: It is a Great Book if you like the idea of a book with no plot. Well, that’s not fair, it does have a plot. So, let me rephrase: It is a Great Book if you like the idea of a book in which the plot deliberately, self-consciously, and knowingly makes absolutely no sense at all. This is different than a plot which just makes no sense—lots of books manage that feat. This book manages to make no sense on purpose.

Why? I assume it is some post-modern attempt to throw off the norms of conventional story-telling in some clever display of brilliance. And the book does show glimmers of cleverness throughout. Pynchon can write well, there is no doubt about that. And he can be funny. And he certainly knows a lot of stuff. Not many novels have math jokes in them or lengthy discussions of the physics of rockets. But, you have to take the bad with the good; coupled with erudition is an adolescent obsession with bodily functions both natural and unnatural.

So, if you want to read some Pynchon, read The Crying of Lot 49. It has everything of merit found in Gravity’s Rainbow, but unlike the latter book, the former is short.

As for the title of the post, Ronnie James Dio, RIP. I have long believed that Dio had the best voice in Heavy Metal—and I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment.