I've read Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, and i'm just a little bit proud. I started it because i'd read Mason & Dixon, and wanted to see how Pynchon's other work stacked up. Then I began hearing rumours that it was a 'difficult' book, so I had to read it then.
Yes, it was difficult, but not impossible. You just had to keep your finger on the wider plot. There were no chapters and the whole thing was stream-of-conciousness, not of the character but of the author.
A brief summary of plot: Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, stationed in London during the V2 blits of 1944, discovers that he can sense the impending arrival of V2 bombs by his tumescence. The top brass find out, and discover that the reason goes back to Pavlovian experiments carried out on the infant Tyrone by Dr Lazlo Jamf, who later invented Imipolex G, an early plastic used in the V2 rocket. The top brass realise that Tyrone is aware of parts of this, so they spoonfeed him enough info to convince him to go AWOL and track down the source of the rockets, hoping that he will lead them to the mysterious S-gerat, rocket 00000, which the Nazis developed in secrecy at the end of the war, then fired. Everyone (British, Americans and Russians) want to know what was so special about the S-gerat. The most organised of the German remnants, the Schwarzcommando, have even gone as far as secretly constructing a second S-gerat, 00001, from spare parts. Tyrone has many adventures with the black market in particular as he wanders 'the Zone', the novel's euphemism for an occupied Germany, where law and order have not yet been restored. He eventually gives up his search, as does the Russian Colonel Tchitcherine, and the Schwarzcommando are left to fire their second rocket in peace. It is only in the last pages that we learn what the S-gerat contained: a human cargo. In great irony, Pynchon forces the reader to remember the first 20 pages of the novel, the seemingly useless introduction of 'Pirate' Prentiss, where he explains that the V2 made it to the edge of space. Thus the S-gerat, developed by the Nazis in secret, was not a vengeance weapon, but a suicide mission for a German, to use the rocket technology to be the first men in space before the Russians and the Americans grabbed the scientists and the equipment.
Pynchon's encyclopaedic vision never falters throughout the book. The reader is constantly belted with new information, 99% of it completely off-topic. The book has a decidedly dark bent, some have called it obscene, and I can only agree. There's a bit about elephants I could go on about for a long time. Other stuff is just plain wierd, like the dance instructions for the songs that start appearing about 3/4 of the way into the book, or the 4-page 'autobiography' of Boris the lightbulb that segues in towards the end.
On a final note, the Wikipedia entry states that the S-gerat ended it's flight by obliterating a cinema. It does not. The symbolism of a crowd in a cinema and the flickering frames is used to describe the moment of the rocket's perihelon, but it's never stated where 00000 actually lands. Does it land at all? Did it make it into orbit? The cinema motif is also used close to the end when Pynchon is talking about John Dillinger. I think someone at Wikipedia is getting a bit mixed up.
