Books (#7)

When I lived in Japan, I dated an American man who told me that he had once written a book, but when he read it in its entirety he realized that it was a paltry imitation of his favourite novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. With that realization, he destroyed the manuscript—hopefully in some suitably dramatic manner—and up to the time we parted ways, had not made a second attempt at a book.

Never having heard of this alleged masterpiece, I was curious, and tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t get very far, probably because I wasn’t super stoned or an uber deep person at the time (I think the same can be said for me now). I could likely get away with telling people I have read it, since what is the probability that anyone I hang out with—I know only one pothead and he doesn’t read much of anything, and I tend to gravitate towards really shallow people to keep my inferiority complex at bay—will actually have read it and ask me what I thought of the part* where Margherita spends many days in a mysterious and ambiguously described factory, clothed in an outfit made from the "erotic" plastic Imipolex G, or to comment on the surprising twist where Katje and Slothrop have sex after he rescues her from an octopus named Grigori that attacked her on a beach in France, after it was trained to do so using Pavlovian conditioning by one of the book’s over 400 characters. (To Katje’s dismay, Slothrop quickly loses interest in her and spends much of Part Three of Gravity’s Rainbow in various disguises, first as an English war correspondent, then as his invented alter-ego Rocketman, wearing an operatic Viking costume with the horns removed from the helmet, making it look like a rocket nose-cone.) And what about those immortal sentient lightbulbs?** 

I’m glad Tim destroyed his manuscript, as I suspect I wouldn’t have been able to get through much of it either, and he would have quickly discovered how little I know about*** spiritualism, statistics, Pavlovian psychology, London in 1944, Berlin, Zürich and Potsdam in 1945, chemical engineering, the Baltic black market, plastics, rocket propulsion and ballistics, economic and military complexes, international industrial cartels (GE, ICI, Shell, Agfa, I.G. Farben), Tarot cards and the Kabbala, witchcraft, espionage, Rossini operas, pop songs and show tunes of the thirties and forties, limericks, cocaine and hashish fantasies, and the history of American clothing styles and slang.

* The rest of this paragraph is shamelessly plagiarized from Wikipedia.

** I’m surprised David Cronenberg hasn’t made a movie based on Gravity’s Rainbow. 

*** The rest of this paragraph is shamelessly plagiarized from a book review in The New York Times.