Struggling Through Gravity's Rainbow

Obviously whatever floats your boat is cool, but I hear this a lot about Pynchon and I vehemently disagree.

The way modern fiction and non-fiction mostly trains you to read is to obsessively track every detail and character and to expect ambiguity is a device for obscuring a plot that will be explained later. When you watch/read game of thrones, you have to keep track of all the characters in your head, and just letting your vision go fuzzy is a surefire way to miss critical moments in the plot and lose an understanding of what is going on.

This leads people to try to read Pynchon like this, but the point of his fiction is to reteach you how to read, you have to approach his novels from the perspective of a Pynchon character. Paranoid, disoriented, probably on drugs, probably not enough drugs for how fucked up things are, confused, and trying to make sense of shadowy plots. Crucially, Pynchon never expects his characters to fully solve or understand the universe they are in , this isn't a mystery novel with a murder detective who figures it out at the end, and Pynchon intends his books to be read from the same mindset.

For new readers this often feels like plunging into the deep end of madness, and readers panic when they realize they obviously can't make sense of Gravity's Rainbow by considering each sentence, one at a time, and making sure to fully understand it before proceeding. The point of my comment here is to emphasize that this is actually a kindness that Pynchon extends to the reader, you are NEVER required to rememeber a specific detail, plot point, character or event in order for things in the novel to pay off later or make sense. In this sense, Pynchon is a kinder writer to his reader than most dense modern fiction by quite a degree in my opinion, and I am not saying that there isn't plot, that things don't come back, and that it isn't rewarding to notice those things but that the fundamental experience of the book is like travelling to a foreign country, your experience isn't hinged upon understanding every word spoken by pedestrians on the street as they pass you by. Sometimes weird shit just happens and you watch it and go "wow, damn never seen that before!".

Ambiguity, as Pynchon points out in many of his novels, is a tension at the heart of our universe, it is present even in the amount of information we can know about subatomic particles.

In other words, I recommend the audiobook precisely because it will help you get lost in Gravity's Rainbow and stop worrying about connecting everything together perfectly or understanding each part in sequence before proceeding. You need to approach this kind of extremely sophisticated storytelling in a way that isn't like approaching a simple narrative of events told in chronological order. This isn't a playscript being read out loud to you with all the stage directions that you need to pay close attention so you don't miss the context, Gravity's Rainbow is a trip, the intention is as much to create a state of mind in the reader as it is to convey specific details, even though those specific details are often fascinating, biting and very on point.

At a high level, Gravity's Rainbow is one of the only modern works of fiction that doesn't straightjacket itself into the "Hero's Journey" narrative, Tyrone Slothrop (an anagram for entropy and chaos) is sort of a hero/antihero but in his "Hero's Journey" he fractures into myth, retold second hand stories, fantasies and lies by the end of the novel. You literally can't follow Gravity's Rainbow like a traditional plot because the inherent structure creates fractures that can't be resolved the way you want them to.

Let go, light up a joint (or don't) and focus on getting lost in the rhythm of the book and less so understanding everything, it is one of my favorite books and I can't tell you how many times I have pulled up random sections to relisten or reread them because the moment to moment experience of the book is so unique and awesome.