Reddit mentions of Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow

Well, if I really have to, I'll pick Gravity's Rainbow, if nothing else because it took me 5 months to get through the damn thing and when I finally finished it about three weeks ago there was this void and I was seriously tempted to start all over again. (I didn't, I bought this one instead, to help with the abstinence.) I'm still thinking about it.

V, on the other hand, was the first Pynchon book I ever read. Knowing absolutely nothing about it I had no idea what to expect, and since it turned out to be very different from anything I can remember ever having read I had a wonderful time reading it.

I agree with you entirely.

I enjoyed V and really enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49 but Gravity's Rainbow was strained to the seams with trying and I respect it absolutely as a work of fiction (and it spawned a series of artwork that I love quite a bit, Zak Smith illustrates Gravity's Rainbow), but I just couldn't appreciate the story itself.

It was so far removed from anything that was, to me, accessible, and even far from what I felt was within the realm of accessibility and it almost felt like Pynchon was doing so to prove that he could. The characters were so far off the chart and the events so drug-addled that I couldn't even enjoy it for the ride, much less make any sense of the whole thing.

This may all, of course, be exactly the point of the book, but I think it loses a lot of its oomph if it's too over the top in its execution so that it doesn't correspond with somebody who's probably precisely predisposed to be reached.

The book just seemed to be such a long string of rather pointless, mostly disjoint vignettes about just, plain, absolute, absurdity, and not in a way that meant anything to me, which is very tragic. I respect it immensely, because I think it probably takes a certain amount of talent to miss as wildly with me as this book did, but it was just a slog from the first paragraph and I thought so much of the good stuff (characterization, a solid message, etc.) was all dispensed with in the name of just pure madcap.

Pynchon's been, sort of weirdly, nominated several times for awful writing (tongue-in-cheek, mostly, predictably, for sex scenes), and I think he's a quintessential author who can just soil his writing by overwriting through it, by making things too explicit and over-wrought and I think that this book has several scenes that, while many may appreciate them, venture into this territory.

I think that, had Pynchon reined his narrative in a little bit like classic DeLillo or some of Pynchon's own other works, this would have been a top-tier work. Something inventive and nailing exactly the zeitgeist of a time when a world-consuming war was eminently relatable, but just the sheer arbitrariness (and arbitrary tawdriness of a lot of the book) made it into something that I just couldn't connect with.

This could be very informative for you.

Zak Smith is a pretty great artist! I fell in love with his "Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated" aka "Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow" and proudly own a first edition print run from before the title was changed. It actually came with a sticker replacing the original title with the new one.

This book is relevant to my interests in a pretty huge way. I think I'm ordering a copy today. Thanks for sharing.

Don't forget the Zak Smith picture accompaniment,
http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798
Remember this is for the children, they need something to help them get through the big words.

Perhaps you'd like Pictures Showing What Happens On Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow by Zak Smith. As I understand it, it's pretty much exactly what the title says it is.

I can't answer your question because I got distracted after starting the second section (~200 pages in) and haven't gotten back to it yet.