Reading Gravity’s Rainbow

Subtitle: A bad dream, or: What does it mean to dislike a book?

You read the title, you know why we are here.

Here I am, having undeniably not enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow, but struggling to actually answer the question ‘Well why didn’t I like it?’ On paper Gravity's Rainbow sounds like exactly my cup of milky builders’ tea, but it turned out that it wasn’t. I didn’t so much finish it as ‘exorcised myself of the literal pages’, as I told my friend OB who loves the book. So where did it all go wrong?

Gravity's Rainbow is a bawdy 800-page pornographic musical set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It’s about paranoia and maybe also science as a phallic display of angst; on a more literal level, the moment you think the plot is about one thing, it veers off into something else and the earlier thing is never mentioned again. Considering it’s ostensibly a Meditation On War, Existence, Science and Interpersonal Interconnectedness, The Greatest American Novel by The Greatest Living Writer Of The English Language (who is Thomas Pynchon, by the way), Key Text of Literary Postmodernism, Encyclopaedic Novel, Absurdist Pastiche, and Reading It Qualifies You To Be A Literature Snob On The Internet Apparently, we were not amused.

Conceptually it’s really cool. The narrative starts at a single point (arguably at the heart of the story’s paranoid web) and fans out - in a way that reminds me of those Angry Birds things that explode into three during its parabolic flight - and ultimately comes full circle. Favourable critics describe the plot trajectory of Gravity's Rainbow as perfectly parabolic or elliptical, which is a fair metaphor, but just a metaphor. The way the plot is interleaved with the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany is impressive, at least before all rhyme and reason went off the rails in the second half. There were lots of philosophical tangents, many with ‘truth, whose mother is history’ vibes. Some plot pivots are notionally intriguing, some episodes moving, but mostly the whole thing teetered on the edge of incoherence, and I-see-you’re-being-absurd-well-done-can-we-stop-now.

There are criticisms I could levy at Gravity's Rainbow, in an attempt to explain why I didn’t like the book. It’s pretentious, in the bad sense - indulgent, overwritten, supercilious. It’s about war and espionage, and there’s a coarse music hall vibe, none of which are especial favourites. There’s a lot of male-fantasy-type sex, including with children. The prose is not easy - trains of thought leap everywhere, perspectives switch halfway through a paragraph, important plot points are drowned out by frivolities. I for one could never quite be sure if a line about chimps is about drunk people or about literal chimps. (It’s about literal chimps. It’s always about literal chimps.)

But these all ring rather hollow to me: not only is being pretentious, niche, problematic, or discursive insufficient grounds to say a book is bad, but these features haven’t stopped me from liking other books. It feels very disingenuous to admonish Gravity's Rainbow for being these things, when they’re literally the traits of my favourite books. Infinite Jest is pretty niche, being about tennis and Quebecois separatism - in fact the war, rockets and espionage in Gravity's Rainbow fall much more within my interests - but Infinite Jest has done that thing that good novels do, made me care about things I’d otherwise never be interested in. Nabokov’s Ada is probably the most ‘problematic’ book I’ve read, what with being an utterly amoral and weirdly wholesome love story about three-way incest, but it’s also one of the most beautiful. Moby Dick is more about philosophical tangents than it is about whales. (Coming to think of it, Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow are kind of similar - both are reflections and critiques of the author’s own sociopolitical environment, but are transposed to a radically different setting; both are kind of about the interconnectedness of human beings and some sort of fatalism.) All these books are amply pretentious and conventionally difficult, rather particular and unsavoury to different extents, but I love them (proverbially) to literal shreds. It doesn’t just feel wrong to criticise Gravity's Rainbow for being those things, it feels lazy.

I asked OB what they liked so much about Gravity's Rainbow, and their answer was that they enjoyed the experience. When OB said they found Infinite Jest particularly lacklustre, the only defence I could give for the book was that I enjoyed the experience.

Which essentially amounts to that, after all our efforts to become more discerning and intelligent readers, it still all comes down to qualia, but now we have more preknowledge to guide the kinds of qualia we experience, and better vocabulary to justify that qualia. ‘Pretentious’ or ‘brilliant’, ‘indulgent’ or ‘maximalist’, ‘masterful’ or ‘overhyped’, ‘key postcolonial text’ or ‘surely we can still do better than this’, ‘circle jerk for science nerds’ or ‘a necessary reassessment of the psychological effects of trusting that science always has the answer’ … … all are post-hoc justifications of that initial feeling, in answer to the primordial question of ‘Does it spark joy?’

So praise and condemnation are two sides of the same coin, and what is a coin but a two-sided disk, what is a cultural artefact but what connects all of its interpretations? So hashtag deep. So we’re not passing judgement on Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest or any other book per se, we’re judging our experiences of it.

~ an aside: My laptop gave me a red dotted line under the word ‘qualia’, so I guess that makes it a niche concept and I should elaborate. (Apologies if you already know what it means, or if you’ve already googled it.) ‘Qualia’ refers to our subjective experiences of the world - colours are the qualia for wavelengths of visible light, the feeling of warmth is the qualia from holding a thing radiating of thermal energy. It’s a philosophy word to distinguish subjective experience from ‘what’s actually there’.

~ an aside within an aside: I found a rant about the word ‘qualia’ on the Wall Street Journal, about how ‘Fuzzy-profound words cause mental rot’ - judging by the half that wasn’t behind a paywall, it’s a few fair criticisms of overly verbose academic language, overshadowed by prescriptivist bullocks about the decline of language and a lack of understanding that different words arise to fill lexical gaps in different discourses / spheres of use, so may look utterly unnecessary inside a different one. It’s like being annoyed that a chess-piece king can’t ratify a bill from Parliament. For the record, academia does need to cultivate a discourse norm of less obscure language, I do agree with that bit. Linguist rant over.

So, where did my experience with Gravity's Rainbow go wrong? (Oh did you also forget that this was about Gravity's Rainbow?)

OB liked Gravity's Rainbow because it was immersive. I found it hard to get any immersion because the prose didn’t grip me, and when absurd elements aren’t enjoyable they become random and grotesque. I spent so much of Gravity's Rainbow skimming ahead, wondering if and when it was going to Spark Joy, rather than trusting the text to sweep me along. I’m not saying I would definitely have loved it had I gone in with a different mindset, but it might have helped.

In hindsight Gravity's Rainbow demanded more of me as a reader than I was planning to give. Maybe I found the disjointed structure too great a leap from the methodical clarity of contemporary linguistics literature, or I was expecting fluid strands of language to run through my mind’s hands (this phrase is so horrific I’m just gonna keep it in) like the Wallace or Nabokov or Woolf I’ve been reading. Maybe I was predisposed against it because I’d heard of its preoccupation with the sexual and the scatological. Maybe I was complacent because I’ve read enough hard books so surely I know what they’re like. Once one finds reason to be sceptical of a book, one sees faults everywhere. Scepticism breeds itself and poisons everything.

I didn’t enjoy Gravity's Rainbow, but I’m glad I read it, if only because now I can access Gravity's Rainbow discourse, and if I come back to it some day I will definitely have a better experience than this time round. I do intend to - to reread Gravity's Rainbow - hopefully one day when time has erased my impressions of it from age 19 and I can appraise it anew unburdened. (Which to be fair does not seem imminently possible especially as I plan on continuing talking and consuming media about the book.) But in the meantime I now know better than to hold it against you if you failed to like Infinite Jest or some other thing that I think is really fun - after all I failed to like Gravity's Rainbow.