Between V., Pynchon's maverick if disorderly first novel, and
Gravity's Rainbow which is still more unstrung and far denser while
lacking the narrative encroachment of the earlier book, there is
even a direct line of extension. Very literally - it is a third
longer than the original's 500 pages; but where V. was only
death-directed, this seems almost death-obsessed and annihilation
(from the V-bombs of World War II to the later Rocket with which
this is concerned) looms over every page in a world where the
technology of terror presides. . . . "Is the cycle over now and a
new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be
the Moon?" Somehow surfacing above it are other nonspecific,
mystic, psychokinetic forces, perhaps Gravity, the "extrasensory in
Earth's mindbody," or more simply, just a sense of wonder. They are
personified in Tyrone Slothrop, the central character, who is
identified as some sort of receiver when first institutionalized in
the Abreaction Ward of a London hospital - he's paranoid - and
later tagged as the Rocketman and sent to the Zone where the later
postwar action partially takes place. Around him are all sorts of
others - scientists, behaviorists, friends (Tantivy who is killed;
statistician Roger Mexico who remains trapped in the detritus of
the War and is unfit for Peace) and assorted girls. It is
reductive, perhaps presumptive, to say what this is all about - the
"depolarizing" or neurotic instability which follows war; the
metallic mechanization of life thereafter; the blacks and
blackness; drugs and sex - a kind of vacant, performing sex; and a
lot of catch-as-catch-can cabala all figure in Pynchon's sort of
social surrealism. He has made no concessions: from the
proliferation of acronyms (some very clever) to the hybrid
referrals (King Kong, Murphy's Law, Godel's Theorem) tailgating
each other in one paragraph; to the words (azimuth, megalo,
runcible, terrenity) which are an "impedance." As of course is all
this jammed input - a parlous challenge to the reader's
perseverance. But then however much the latter may have been
strained, one must pay tribute to Pynchon's plastic imagination,
his stunning creative energy, and here and there the transcendent
prose: "It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the
yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing,
fawning upward without shame" - all marvelously descriptive of the
world in which we live and are sure to die. (Kirkus Reviews)
Set in the closing years of World War II, this is a story of labyrinthine interconnections involving a Nazi Lieutenant Weissmann (once V.'s lover in another Pynchon novel), disguised as Captain Blicero, and an American sleuth, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, while V-2 rockets fall on London.
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