SOURCE: Tanner, Tony. “Gravity's Rainbow.” In Thomas Pynchon, pp. 74-95. New York: Methuen, 1982.

In the following essay, Tanner demonstrates how Gravity's Rainbow subverts the traditional methods of reading, suggesting that this strategy renders conventional attempts to interpret the text ineffective.

Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is a novel of such vastness and range that it defies—with a determination unusual even in this age of ‘difficult’ books—any summary. It defies quite a lot of other things as well. There are over 400 characters—we should perhaps say ‘names', since the ontological status of the figures that drift and stream across the pages is radically uncertain. There are many discernible, or half-discernible, plots, involving, for example, the GI Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual encounters in London during the war uncannily anticipate where the V2 rockets fall; a rocket genius named Captain Blicero (later Major Weissmann); Franz Pökler, who worked on the rocket...