Gravity's Rainbow
1973
Postmodern fiction
Set in the final months of World War II and its aftermath, the novel follows Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose erections seem to predict where German V-2 rockets will fall. From this premise Pynchon builds an enormous, digressive, hallucinatory work spanning dozens of characters and storylines, touching on paranoia, entropy, corporate power, and the death drive. Winner of the National Book Award and a byword for ambitious, difficult fiction.
Episodes
Discussion
Fleeting mentions
- 68. Middlemarch, part 2: Pity the man with the young hot wife
- 63. American Pastoral, part 1: Baby's First Lit Fic
- 59. Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game: What's the ultimate desert island book?
- 57. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein: Look how they massacred my boy
- 51. Murakami's Norwegian Wood: the sadboi and his manic pixie dream girls
- 20. Albert Camus' The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-awareness
- 7. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, part 2: Portrait of the autist as an old man