Unfulfilled predictions, he-he-he

[Ya Sam]

'Yet the prose text of Gravity's Rainbow seems to me-- to put the case 
against it all too bluntly--one which lacks a serious fiction's essential 
fidelity to a reciprocated human norm. [...] As a narrative fiction 
Gravity's Rainbow seems less written than programmed. Its constituent 
elements and persons (and their personalized delusions) cast no affective 
shadow of their own; they exist only to serve the preconceived mechanism of 
the whole. [...] As a printed text the book can feel, if you give your mind 
to it, quite powerful as an expression of recognizable contemporary 
obsessions, and as an immense ritual charm against them. Yet I doubt very 
much whether it will prove to have any continuing importance in literary 
history [...]

Warner Berthoff, 'A Literature Without Qualities: American Writing since 
1945', 1979, pp. 70-73.

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