Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon · b. 1937 · USA
Why it matters
V-2 rockets, conditioned desire, and four hundred characters across the ruins of 1945: postmodernism's Everest. The Pulitzer board vetoed its own jury over it; the novel outlived the scandal into permanence.
At a glance
postmodernwar novel
Difficulty 10/10slow pace776 pagesEncyclopedic digression, hundreds of characters, and fractured chronology test any reader.
Deep dive
Why a man's erections predicting rocket strikes is the least strange thing about this novel's theology of paranoia, plastic, and the bomb.
