Rating: 
Summary: The Greatest Novel of the 20th Century
Review: Don't let the folks at the Modern Library fool you. "Ulysses" is a great novel, but it is not even in the same league with "Gravity's Rainbow." Joyce may have had "the mind of a greengrocer" (or so he once said), but Pynchon is the grocer, physicist, shaman, hipster, and overall Master of the English Language as we know it! (And that's only the first 100 pages!!)Those who read this novel with "traditional" expectations of fiction will be sorely disappointed. It is more easily read as a flow of words through one of the greatest minds to ever sit behind a typewriter. A colleague of mine even claims it should be read not as a novel, but as poetry. Many of the passages are richly poetic, resonating with the reader for weeks afterwards. For me, this is fiction at its best: daring, inventive, metaphorically rich, with a moral we can all understand in this age of continual warfare on some corner of the Earth while corporations ! sit back and laugh all the way to the bank, leaving the rest of us filling our homes with "stuff" bought and paid for with the blood of innocents. Others will be put off by the sheer size of the book, but to quote Pynchon, "It was worth the trip, if only to see this shining." A must-read if you ever hope to truly understand the world we live in.
Rating:
Summary: It's Power, not Understanding
Review: I can't believe than anyone "understands" more than 20% of Pynchon's metaphors, references, etc...but it's really no more about "understanding" than Life is about "understanding." The power of the book rests in its ability to touch our inner selves, lost souls in a world not of our making. It's scary, upsetting, confusing. As a book, it's masterful.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but no Gaddis
Review: Gravity's Rainbow is an excellent novel. Pynchon is one of the pre-eminent writers in American letters. So I encourage all who enjoyed GR to explore another novel: The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. If you still feel Pynchon is God, fair enough. But at least view the real competition, which has been concealed for far too long.
Rating:
Summary: Great! Reminded me of my childhood and teenage years.
Review: Excellent characters and fantastic imagery. Must read for anyone attempting to understand the drug culture. Great conspiracy theory.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother
Review: 400 characters and too many thoughts later I felt empty and used. Look, I've read Finnegan's Wake and I was confused and angry during "Gravity's Rainbow." 'Nuff said.
Rating:
Summary: Obscure and Disjointed
Review: I've searched but I can't find the literary side of this book. Where are timeless themes, the affective characterizations? The book's a little like Finnegan's Wake -- too obscure, too 'over the top.' Excuse me, but the book doesn't make integral sense. This long tome is more a collection of random sentences and rambling paragraphs too often concluded with three (let's be honest) fatuous, trailing dots. No, GR is not literature -- it's more like a going out of business sale -- it's everything PLUS the kitchen sink. And beware: one needs a companion book to understand it 'fully'. This book's failings are in part a function of it's time -- the early 70's - when culture was naively experimental, half-baked, vulgar, and exhibitionist.
Rating:
Summary: Pynchon's Point
Review: What's Pynchon's point? Be Nice! The costs of behaving otherwise are enumerated at length.
Rating:
Summary: Gravity's Rainbow: the Bible for the Church of Paranoia
Review: Pynchon's days on earth are numbered, but GR
is here to stay. Even with all its 60's kitsch, contrived jokes, and incoherent plot, generations of swingers n' zoot-suiters find their sacred scripture in its paranoid text. A hundred years from now, when Pynchon is long gone, Paranoiacs the world over will read, reread, disect, and dispute this most cryptic text since Finnegan's Wake. GR is our new Bible, and Pynchon's a zany Moses in America.
A hilarious book if you get all the jokes, but even an idiot can laugh at the "candy chapter," in which our hero is force-fed disgusting British toffees. But the humor only accents the kabbalah-like mysteries that demand to be researched for decades to come, the way only a truly phenominal work of literature can.
Rating: 
Summary: I've got a map like Slothrop's at home
Review: Is it legal to review a book you haven't read? Not that I didn't try - I did. I made it to p. 336; there's nothing special or completely awful occuring at that moment, just one straw too many. What was wrong? I didn't get it. Now, there are plenty of things I don't understand - the proof of Fermat's last theorem, Quantum Thermodynamics, Spice Girls - and I am not so arrogant as to assume that everything I don't get is not worth getting (what is my word against so many 10s?). But I'd like to think that the English language is comprehensive enough to allow someone to get their point across without much trouble. When they do not, they are either incompetent or intentionally incomprehensible; and again, I am not willing to lay the former crime on Pynchon. But the latter...many reviewers seem to revel in the fact that there is no plot, or that the book goes every way but straight. Why? For the sake of being different? That's fine, but how is one to distinguish between erudite pseudononsense and just plain crap? How do I know that the smudged canvas is truly a work of art, as opposed to a kindergartener's mistake? In this case I don't know - it certainly has big words and obscure references, but the same could be accomplished by a simple AI program grabbing bits and pieces from Encylopedias. What it doesn't have is coherence, at least not on a level that I can reach. So, should you read the book? No. But I do think you should buy it, put it in a prominent location on your bookshelf, and when someone asks you about it, smile knowingly and say, "Ah yes, a true modern classic" - no one will know the difference.
Rating:
Summary: High Brow, Low Brow, and the Joy of Incomprehension
Review: Oh, kids. It's true I'm of the Rabid Fan phylum of Pynchon readers, but I admit to slamming the book shut on my first try (at the entirely naive and inappropriate age of 17--age 17 is inappropriate for everything, I feel) and throwing it with great velocity at the wall. The facts are plain: this is a confusing, unwieldy, untrimmed book. But like a Zen koan (and apparently just as idiotic to certain American efficient frames of mind), where the prose is "weak" to some readers is where its greatest strengths lie. The parodies of cinematic humor sitting right up next to gorgeous, complex, erudite philosophical passages, the multi-voicedness of it all, the contradictoriness, the rapid and impatient shifts of tone, the obscure science, the horrible puns, the occult spirituality, all represented by a narrator whom one feels is always pulling the hood over our eyes the more he reveals--this is the American novel, or the novel at all, that attempts to snare the wild improbabilities of the American Century and make of it a wild and entertaining fiction. Yes, the joke is on you, of course; poor Slothrop, Pynchon's Ideal Paranoid, understands this better than anyone. You have come, shall we say, with certain expectations, for causality, and Meaning, and Character Development. Well, you get what you deserve. When we read fiction--especially the sort of fiction many anti-Pynchon readers on these pages claim to desire, the "clear" sort--we are always in some way being finagled, into thinking things are happening when they are not, into having the world arranged in ways that perhaps are untrue or harmful, into purposeful blind spots. A reader has every reason to be paranoid when faced with Authority--and with Authors. If you want to be soothed, buy "14,000 Things to Be Happy About" (real book). The most disturbing (and delightful) thing about Pynchon's fiction is how his sheer UNeconomy of language insinuates an utterly ungraspable world. And it's funny, too, but only if ! you can laugh at yourself... And the people in it are nasty and do nasty things to one another, and the scientists are superstitious, and the world is bawdy and sometimes dull and sometimes sublime and we are lost in it, but there are moments of beauty, and connection, and glimpses of things beyond human understanding, "the palm at the end of the mind," to quote Wallace Stevens. And Pynchon's not making up half of it. A literary tradition that ignores the culture of television, comic books, American idiocy, and that deliberate, malicious American innocence that in the era after Freud wants Skinnerian psychology in which behavior can be cheerfully normalized, that bans Lolita while it stares at Alicia Silverstone's legs in the glossy magazines, that uses the 20th century's horrible sense of endless irony to SELL US stuff--well, what does it do for you? You can keep your COLD MOUNTAINs. This is one of the greatest books ever written, and you can tell your mama I said so.
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