The acclaim conferred upon Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow¹ probably reveals more about the uncertain state of our literary culture than about Pynchon’s novel itself, which is brilliant in parts but confused and exceedingly tedious as a whole. There is, to be sure, a compelling seriousness in this immensely long book, and its author’s remarkable verbal gifts are matched, even surpassed, by an extraordinary knowingness concerning modern literature, history, popular culture, statistical method, rocketry, the occult, Puritanism, the history of chemistry, and much, much more. But the claims made upon us by good novels, not to say great ones, surely differ from the claims put to us by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we do well to be suspicious of reviewers who think to win our regard for Pynchon’s book by offering us elaborate inventories of its literary allusions or by expressing wonderment over its compulsive inclusiveness concerning historical and scientific lore.

It is scarcely puzzling that Gravity’s Rainbow would be read uncautiously by reviewers already committed to the Pynchon cult—one of whom described V (1963) as “the most masterful first novel in the history of literature”—or by reviewers sympathetic to that fashionable radicalism whose chief features are a contempt for “established” culture and a blind devotion to apocalyptic styles and gestures. But it is surprising, or at least significant, that the consensus on Gravity’s Rainbow should have turned out to be so encompassing, the Yale Review, no less, over-going the Village Voice in its unqualified enthusiasm for what it described as “certainly the most important novel to be published in English in the past thirty years.”

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Set in England and occupied Europe near the end of World War II, but ranging in flashbacks and extended allusions across much of Western history, Pynchon’s novel is governed by a desperate intuition of annihilation. In the opening chapter an English intelligence officer wakes from a dream of death into the real day-light of London during the Blitz, sees the vapor trail of a rocket in the sky and waits helplessly for its impact. “What if it should hit exactly,” he thinks, “for a split second you’d have to feel the very point . . . strike the top of the skull.” In the last chapter—some 750 densely obscure pages later—another rocket descends. But this time its “pointed tip . . ., falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound,” is said to promise a full apocalypse; its target now is “everybody”—Pynchon’s characters, the author himself, even his readers, all are caught in a literally final moment of prayer and terror prior to the death of the world.

This framing vision of death from the sky encloses a narrative—more accurately three or perhaps four main narratives and countless subsidiary stories—whose intricacy and enormous cast of characters would test the ingenuity of even the most dedicated puzzle-solver. One reviewer, whose respect for mere arithmetic far exceeds my own, reported counting at least three hundred characters and solemnly advised readers to keep an index of their first appearances.

The book’s principal figure is an American officer named Tyrone Slothrop—much is made of his Puritan ancestry—who is serving in London as the novel begins. Ostensibly part of a vast intelligence operation whose task is to defend against the new V-2 rocket, Slothrop is himself spied upon, then victimized, by his own superiors, chief among whom is the English behaviorist Edward Pointsman whose brutal manipulation of the inner lives of his victims parallels the sexual violations committed by his Nazi counterpart, a rocket-commander named Blicero. Slothrop is important to Pointsman because a chart of his sexual conquests is discovered to correspond exactly to a map of V-2 strike-points, a correspondence whose military significance interests Pointsman much less than its apparent denial of known laws of cause and effect. Escaping from Pointsman fairly early in the book, Slothrop works his way through a ravaged, surrealistically transfigured European landscape, assuming bizarre disguises and encountering a large population of fellow victims, spies, counterspies, and grotesques—all of whom are ultimately (if often unknowingly) connected to one another, creatures in a world whose hidden linkages exhibit the terrible perfect coherence of paranoia. Slothrop’s mysterious foreknowledge of the V-2 impact-sites, for example, turns out to be a consequence of his childhood conditioning by the Pavlovian experimenter, Laszlo Jamf, who subsequently engaged in rocket research in Germany and whose discovery of a special substance called Imipolex G is incorporated in the super-rocket that is launched in the final pages of the novel.

There is special irony in the fact that so many reviewers found Pynchon’s undeniable intricacy and the prodigious scale of his book to be the ground of their excessive respect. For Gravity’s Rainbow, far more effectively than Pynchon’s two earlier novels, cultivates a tone of obsessive insouciance, and its comic (if finally wearying) irreverence is directed in part against the very pieties that have moved the reviewers to such extravagant praise. The peculiarly American and Puritan respect for laborious steadfastness, our culture’s largely unexamined reverence for achievements of labyrinthine size, for all massive, intricate structures and enterprises—this reverence is at once absurd and contemptible to Pynchon, whose “heroes” are aimless victims, their lives damaged if not entirely absorbed by obscurely powerful systems—cartels, governments, espionage agencies—whose massive scale and complexity defy merely individual attempts to escape or simply to explain them. What is large and complicated, Pynchon tells us in his best (and self-judging) moments, what has taken years to build, is not therefore lovely or valuable, and may indeed be aberrant, grotesque, even murderous. The V-2 rocket—whose trajectory is described in Pynchon’s title—is the novel’s master emblem for this perverse misdirecting and abuse of living human energies, and one imagines that the reviewers’ awed praise for the jigsaw-puzzle elaborateness of the book, for its sheer monumentalness, is less a source of pleasure than of discomfort for its author.

There are powerful and moving signs within the novel itself of precisely such discomfort, an unresolved, recurring suggestion that the haunted sensibility behind the book is more victim than master of the paranoia, solitariness, and necrophobia that are its principal themes. A balanced assessment of Gravity’s Rainbow, it seems to me, would concede the genuine seriousness, the honesty, of Pynchon’s efforts to confront and to dramatize his deepest fears and obsessions, and would concede as well that there are many dazzling passages in which these efforts succeed. But such an estimate would also involve the recognition that Pynchon’s control of his materials is partial, radically imperfect. Put bluntly, by page 400 even the committed reader must begin to feel that he has had enough; by page 600 one begins to understand that Pynchon cannot stop himself, that he is in the grip of a compulsion to elaborate his design for its own sake and to repeat variations on themes long since extended and clarified. The fantastic doublings and triplings and quadruplings of plot and subplot, the wildly unchecked impulse to surreal enlargement and exaggeration, the desperate, bizarre puns and jokes, the comic-strip fragmentation of scene and narrative line, the apparently uncontrollable need for variations and reenactments that do not advance or deepen or qualify but merely repeat again, and yet again, what has come before—all this creates an inescapable impression not of imaginative vigor and fullness but of simple frenzy: a frenzy that muddles the distinction between literature and pathology and that leads ultimately to self-defeating confusion.

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The essence of Pynchon’s argument, his root subject, is human freedom or perhaps more accurately, the absence of freedom. In V and more compellingly in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon seeks to expose the men and especially the institutional and theoretical systems that stand in totalitarian opposition to individual fulfillment. His programmatic flouting of the conventions of realism is a direct and necessary consequence of this enterprise because he is concerned to represent the enemies of freedom not exactly as they exist outwardly in the “real” world, but rather as they are perceived in grotesquely distorted enlargement by the world’s imprisoned or manipulated victims—the Preterite of the earth as they are called in the latest book, the great mass of ordinary individuals who are without privilege or station and who are not infected with Faustian ambitions. From this perspective, although their manic proliferation in Gravity’s Rainbow is open to challenge, even Pynchon’s extended, vividly concrete scenes of surreal degradation, masochism, and aggression must be regarded as a crucial, wholly legitimate aspect of his work. For these externalized enactments of his characters’ fantasies—and the extraordinary tenderness with which Pynchon renders them—are intended to ratify a vision of the world in which our outer lives are so controlled and manipulated and unfree that only the inner life, in all its shocking elemental idiosyncrasy, remains as a precious sanctuary of individuality and freedom. Indeed, the tone of mordant comic desperation in Gravity’s Rainbow, and the book’s main plot as well, originate in part in Pynchon’s fear that even this last line of defense, the vital inward life of our fantasies and repressions, is being menaced by a monstrous alliance of technology, political power, and behaviorist psychology.

To see Pynchon’s intentions in this light is to understand the quality of his seriousness, if not finally to applaud his actual achievement. One need not accept his vision of things in order to acknowledge its integrity, and it is essential to recognize that Pynchon’s work is far superior to that of a writer like William Burroughs, whose scenes of degradation and apocalypse have no authentic source beyond a desire for shock and self-gratification. Despite its extravagance, the critical enthusiasm for Gravity’s Rainbow will have been valuable if it encourages a recognition of Pynchon’s lonely integrity in a fictional mode currently infested with a whole swarm of trivial counterfeit Kafkas.

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But intentions are not achievements, and Gravity’s Rainbow remains, I think, a deeply confused and finally unpersuasive work. The heart of the confusion is the book’s failure, or its inability, to convince us of the individuality of its characters, even those who play major parts in its tangled, extended drama. To complain that Pynchon’s people are not credible is not to object to the surrealistic mode of Gravity’s Rainbow. It is not, that is, to withhold belief in his characters because what happens to them could not happen in the ordinary world we inhabit. Pynchon, as I have tried to suggest, is fully entitled to his imaginative distortions of reality. But there are some liberties denied to him in consequence of his underlying theme and in consequence of his very ambitiousness.

The epic proportions and strategies of Gravity’s Rainbow, its historical range, its immense cast of characters, all these continually insist on the book’s universality: they make an unmistakable claim to represent not the agonies and obsessions of a single sensibility but the true nature of the modern world and, beyond this, of Western culture as a whole. To authenticate such a claim Pynchon must populate his book with people who are distinguishable from one another and from himself; he must imagine a world whose amplitude can be perceived not simply in its temporal or spacial extensiveness but also in its human variousness; he must not imprison his characters so narrowly as to force their every thought and act to betray their origins in his own imperial intentions for the structure or meaning of his novel. That he fails here, and decisively, becomes increasingly clear as the book continues, as plot and subplot wind back upon themselves, as the fantasies as well as the outer adventures of the characters, despite superficial differences in detail, begin to seem interchangeably obedient to a single paranoid drama whose recurring categories include excrement, sexual violation, enclosure, and imprisonment.

Moreover, Pynchon’s reductive characterization is a source of further confusion exactly because his seminal theme is our menaced personal freedom. If his characters have no autonomy to lose, if they appear mainly as virtual puppets—creatures of his abstract design or his inner needs—then Pynchon’s argument is enfeebled beyond cure; and what is intended to be a rich paradigm for the human circumstance becomes merely a self-validating if ingenious artifact whose coherence has been established only by ignoring precisely those qualities of personal idiosyncrasy and autonomy that the novel claims as its generative concern.

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There is a sour paradox in the rigor with which Gravity’s Rainbow confutes itself. For though Pynchon’s sympathies—his clear humane intentions—are fully given over to the Slothrops of the world, his actual performance would seem to ally him with the characters he wishes to condemn and expose. As Pointsman or Blicero manipulate and encage their victims, so Pynchon the novelist rules his characters, denying or reducing their potential for individuation out of an unyielding and systematic need to fit them to general meanings that collide with or, at best, simply ignore their allegedly individual natures.

Early in the story, for example—in a passage widely praised by the reviewers—Slothrop lapses into a drug-induced fantasy in which he descends through a toilet into the Boston sewers in order to escape from an assault-team of black-rapist-militants led by the young Malcolm X. The episode is full of vividly particularizing details; it is elaborately linked to many other episodes in the novel. But its largest effect is to reduce Slothrop to a mere name, his personal attributes absorbed or simply forgotten by Pynchon’s rage for order. That this fantasy of racial uprising and homosexual rape belongs not to Slothrop but to his tendentious creator becomes clear when we learn that the whole passage is an elaborately detailed appropriation of the third and fourth chapters of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which recount Malcolm’s experiences as an attendant and shoe-shine boy in the men’s room of the Roseland Ballroom in Boston. It is the facts of Malcolm’s life, not Slothrop’s, that explain the passage: that explain why he gets sick in this men’s room in this thematically convenient historical moment.

The episode, like most in the novel, offers a brilliantly realized sense of locale, of the physical space in which the action occurs, but it is far less persuasive concerning the individual who allegedly inhabits that space. If we ask why Slothrop’s fantasy life should express itself in this way, why he should be obsessed by toilets or blacks or homosexuality, our answers must look through or beyond him: the book is about paranoia; racial oppression is one of its themes; enclosure in small places and homosexual violation are necessary to the book’s design. Or we might be told that all white Americans harbor such fears and that Slothrop is their emblem here. But this answer, too, though it extends Pynchon’s conception in yet another (and, of course, questionable) way, defines Slothrop yet again not as an individual but as a member of a class, a mere carrier of meanings outside himself, a human cipher whose inner life is in essence almost indistinguishable from that of the other characters in this obsessively self-ratifying world.

In a writer of merely ordinary talent this constricting purposiveness would be far more obvious, but Pynchon is ho ordinary writer. Relying on an apparently limitless fund of knowledge and commanding a prose style whose richness and suppleness justify comparison with Dickens and Joyce, Pynchon is capable of overwhelming scenic vividness. I think it possible, in fact, that Pynchon himself, along with most of his reviewers, was simply swept along by this extraordinary gift for dramatic immediacy and particularity. Admirable as this gift is, however, it cannot do everything, and in the end, I think, it becomes clear that no amount of historical knowingness, no inventory of brilliantly authentic external details, can answer for Pynchon’s failure to allow his characters an imaginative space of their own.

That the author of Gravity’s Rainbow is ambitious and talented is surely true. But I think he has not yet written a book in which his powerful intuition of crisis and his hunger for coherence have yielded fully to the claims of art.

¹ Viking, 760 pp., .$15.00