Black curtains hold within the home windows of a dinky suburban LA condominium, two blocks from the Pacific, blotting out the sunshine. Inside, Thomas Pynchon—early thirties, awkward, with a Zappa ’stache—scribbles on reams of graph paper. The scene is spartan: a cot, some books, a messy pile of correspondence, a group of chintzy piggy banks. On his desk sits an advert hoc mannequin rocket, jerry-rigged collectively from a paper clip and an outdated pencil eraser. A buddy of Pynchon’s described the vibe in a gents’s journal as “a monk’s cell decorated by the Salvation Army.” Outside, the world rages on. The Watts riots. LSD. The Space Race. Watergate. The Bomb. Society is seized by one roiling convulsion after the subsequent. Fantasies of post-WWII prosperity curdle into generational revolt, paranoia, and duck-and-cover drills. At his desk, Pynchon is processing all of it, absorbing it—like Emerson’s clear eyeball, however hyper-dilated and a bit bleary from an excessive amount of Panama Red. What despatched the world reeling? 

To unravel such a Big Question, Pynchon will need to have learn broadly: about artificial chemistry and Calvinist prophecy and Kabbalah and Turkic alphabet reform. But most of all, it appears, he examine rockets. There is a degree in a rocket’s parabola known as Brennschluss (“burnout,” in German). It marks the second at which the missile exhausts its gas and continues its descent aided solely by the power of gravity. As he frames it in his seminal novel Gravity’s Rainbow, World War II—with its missiles and demise camps and atomic bombs that sealed humanity’s suicidal covenant with know-how—was civilization’s Brennschluss, and we now have been in free fall ever since.

February 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow. A controversial literary sensation when it was revealed—it was infamously snubbed by Pulitzer higher-ups, regardless of unanimous suggestion from the fiction jury—the novel has since gathered a frightening repute. Like Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow is the form of ebook folks faux to learn to seem sensible whereas driving the bus. A New York journal critic as soon as dubbed it “perhaps the least-read must-read in American history.”

This repute does an apparent disservice to the ebook itself, and to a possible viewers of curious readers. The time to select up Gravity’s Rainbow is now. It is directly a busy almanac of its period and a type of discipline information for our personal. It echoes eerily within the new-ish millennium. In a means, our personal age’s greasy stew of absurdity and apocalypticism, creeping demise tinged with clown-shoe idiocy, suggests a world that has lastly, fatefully, caught up with Pynchon. We are nonetheless residing underneath Gravity’s Rainbow.

If anybody is aware of something in regards to the writer, it’s that no person is aware of a complete lot about him. Arguably essentially the most dedicated residing thriller in American letters, Pynchon virtually makes Cormac McCarthy seem like some literary gadfly. After graduating from Cornell in 1959, Pynchon moved to Seattle, the place he wrote technical literature and inner newsletters for Boeing. It was there that he grew to become intimately aware of the science, logistics, and jargon of heavy weapons manufacturing and the rising aerospace trade. It was additionally the place he started honing his personal literary model—in a single article, he compares the connection between the US Air Force and personal aerospace contractors to a contented marriage, copping an ironic tone that may later outline his fiction. Pynchon was, for a short interval, basically a functionary (albeit a cheeky, sarcastic functionary) inside America’s increasing military-industrial advanced. This means he knew about ballistics. And rockets. And what these weapons have been able to doing, not solely to their supposed targets however to the souls of those that wrought them. 

Anti-war, anti-capitalist, and prolifically vulgar, Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel of concepts, large and small. Across 700-plus pages, Pynchon teases out a hefty head journey of plots and subplots, introduces lots of of characters, and riffs on rocket science, cinema, Germanic runology, Pavlovian behaviorism, chance concept, witchcraft, futurism, zoot-suit couture, psychedelic chemistry, and the annihilation of the dodo. But there may be, amid the novel’s encyclopedic remit, one thing like a narrative.

It’s the story of Tyrone Slothrop, a Harvard-educated, Massachusetts blue blood. Because the waypoints of his sexual encounters appear to match completely with the Nazis’ V-2 rocket strikes in London, a small cadre of Allied intelligence operatives imagine he possesses an odd magnetism, or magic. Various factions push Slothrop round like a pawn, wielding him in service of their schemes, as he winds by the Zone (the moniker given to postwar Germany) on a woozy, picaresque journey. He rescues a damsel from an infinite octopus. Dressed in a stolen cape and mangled Wagnerian opera helmet, he recasts himself because the superhero Rocketman and recovers a brick of hash hidden at Potsdam. He meets Mickey Rooney, fornicates prolifically, will get in a high-altitude cream-pie struggle, and narrowly avoids castration. Along the best way, he scrambles for details about a mysterious rocket recognized solely because the 00000 and tries to parse his personal motivations from these imposed on him. Which strikes are Slothrop making freely? And that are being guided by some ominous, invisible hand? It’s one lackey’s quest to unshackle himself from stoogedom. Slothrop’s bizarre odyssey, and the novel’s seeming chaos, are ordered by one factor: the rocket.

A V-2 rocket is the very first thing the reader encounters within the novel’s opening traces: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” The Nazi weapon broke the sound barrier: It exploded earlier than anybody heard it coming. No warning. The V-2 violated primary conceptions of trigger and impact. Gravity’s Rainbow unfolds inside this discombobulation.