On finishing "Gravity's Rainbow"

I don't know how to talk about this book like a normal person because there's no normal person who remains after reading this book.

But!, there's value in plain-speaking (a lesson desired especially in these past six months), so let's dispense: "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon is the most astounding novel I've ever read. It is not my favorite ("As I Lay Dying") or the most triumphant ("East of Eden") or my most recommended ("100 Years of Solitude") but it is a marvel entirely of its own class.

Reading this book is like micro-dosing insanity (a compliment). Because there is just so much in "Gravity's Rainbow"—government plots, corporate cartels, folklore magick, pinball paranoia, immortal lightbulb revolution (hard to explain), ghosts, visitations, séances, chameleon subterfuge, sexual bondage, drug trafficking, expressionist German filmmaking, the deployment of a foreign alphabet, two genocides, so much goddamn math, and the infinite parabola of rocketflight—it becomes impossible to see the world around you away from the prism of the novel. Everything becomes connected. In fact, when I saw a character's name spelled out in large letters on a tarp stretched over grassland as my flight arrived in Tallinn earlier this year, I feared I'd gone briefly manic. When I learned that the book's depiction of gay concentration camp detainees who assumed the role of their captors—even wearing their uniforms—echoed into real life some 30 years later, I'd become convinced.

This paranoia is central both to the plot and the experience of reading "Gravity's Rainbow," and it comes with (dare I say) purpose. If you look closely at the world around you, you will see The Pattern, and The Pattern is man-made toward war. Companies will reshape themselves to profit off war. Fathers will valorize themselves in leaving their children to die for war. Atrocities will be forgiven to mine talents honed during war. "They" will move borders to consolidate power after war. And people will be eternally displaced—maybe to never allow the risk of a foothold against Them—due to war.

There were other organizing principles of the world before this—religion, magic, the secret-keeping of oral tradition and song—but the world we live in now is structured ceaselessly toward war.

But, as the novel suggests, there are ways out. Love will always emerge. Control will always slip, if only briefly. And the long dotted line of our lives—what families expect of us, what governments demand, what arc we're supposed to trace in the sky before landing (detonating?) against the ground—can be erased by something so simple, so constant, as the wind.

10/10 I cannot fucking wait to read this again in 10 years.