The Art of Being an Original Original (washingtonpost.com)

[Paul Mackin]

   *Thomas Pynchon: "Gravity's Rainbow" *(1973). On one level, the 
"story" of this vast novel can be told in a single sentence: a missile 
-- a genuine, verifiable WMD -- is fired on the first page and comes 
down on the last. True enough, but one might as well call "Moby-Dick" a 
fish story. At 760 pages, "Gravity's Rainbow" is both grim and 
hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in 
mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little 
lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so 
incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are 
obliterated.

Although the action is mostly set in the days immediately after World 
War II, Pynchon's sensibilities are rooted in the counterculture of the 
1960s, with an ingrained anti-authoritarianism that spills over into his 
approach to language. The characters are likely to blithely abandon 
fictional "reality" and suddenly break into saccharine foxtrots or 
bizarre operatic duets. "Gravity's Rainbow" includes, among other 
incongruities, characters with names like Geli Tripping, Major Marvy, 
Pirate Prentice and Jessica Swanlake; an anthropomorphized light bulb 
that refuses to burn out; a fat little boy desperately searching for his 
lost lemming, Ursula; a cameo appearance by Mickey Rooney; and the tale 
of a lengthy dive through the sewers of Boston by the novel's ostensible 
"hero," Tyrone Slothrop, set on recovering his mouth harp, which was 
lost in the toilet of a Roxbury jazz club.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48470-2004Jan1_2.html