As a work of literary art, Gravity’s Rainbow is a pyrotechnic masterpiece; as a story, disorienting and somewhat fatiguing. The plot is metastatically loopy, the comedy burlesque, the pathos affecting, the ideas complex, the erudition formidable, the level of detail perfectionist, and the prose virtuosic and poetically footloose—at points demanding diligent attention lest you burble into befuddlement. I did my best with it, but I cannot, for love or money, summarise you the plot.

As I was reading (and posting online about the queasy trial of reading), somebody on a server suggested to me that the book’s nonlinear structure illustrates “the paranoiac function of causal relationships”, developing the book’s exploration of “how causation works or doesn’t”, which it achieves “by pointing out the hubris in nearly every facet of our culture”. These comments switched on a lightbulb, and continuing with them in mind helped me construe the reading experience. Our most basic urges and fears drive us to a desperate faith in meaningfulness; the gestalt bodied forth by this novel’s heady potpourri of the conspiratorial, the libidinal, and the supernatural challenges such belief in a rational universe where cause begets effect. 

That said—did the author truly require nearly 800 genius-sodden pages to execute this sweep-kick against perfidious causality? Gravity’s Rainbow poses me one of those paradoxes of greatness-versus-goodness where, the more convinced I am that it is great (as it most palpably is), the less confident I am in deciding for myself whether it is good—so do I five-star it objectively for scintillating artistry, or three-star it subjectively for middling enjoyment?

To be fair, around the final third of the book, I began to get into the groove and found material to savour; by then I suppose I’d settled into a certain liberatory resignation. In any case, if you haven’t already read this book, then either the above description makes you eager to experience it, or you’re making the sign of the cross and backing away, hissing. For what it’s worth, I found the novel highly stimulating, albeit more impressive than gratifying.