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Beyond the Zero

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After sorting through all my books, I dug up a dusty copy of Gravity's Rainbow along with a companion volume by Stephen Weisenburger.  Unfortunately it is not the Viking first edition hardback, which can fetch as much as 42 grand on the book market, if you are lucky to have one signed by the author.  I have the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century edition.  Any number of wonderful fake covers have been made, like the one above by Kacper Kiec.  

I've made it through Beyond the Zero, and have to say it is a lot easier going than I expected.  Not that I'm a WWII buff and know all the nomenclature, but I have read a fair amount of Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and other authors who have delved into the subject and know the territory.

The relationship between Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake reminds me a lot of The End of the Affair, albeit set just after the war.   It's the kind of torrid romance you expect from a city besieged by V-1 bombs.  Roger has worked out a formula that tightly sums up the myriad of strikes, which he has carefully mapped by breaking the city down into tiny quadrants, but isn't very good at predicting where the next one will fall, which is what the joint American-British forces are determined to find out.  Roger finds his sexual release in Jessica, who to this point is pretty much a foil, but I suspect more will come of her character in the pages to come.

The book is awash in the minutest details from that era, which is where Weisenburger comes in, painstakingly researching every one of these references.  But, I think these references are mostly there to add color, to get the reader to picture the scenes in their fullest, right down to the lace on Jessica's tap panties.  Pynchon leaves nothing out.

Where the book does get difficult is when Pynchon goes off on one of his scatalogical reveries like Slothrop's descent down a toilet in search of a harmonica he dropped in it.  We are introduced to a gang of black ruffians let by Red the Negro shoe shine boy, who Weisenburger believes is a reference to Malcolm X.  The scene is set at the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which Slothrop is recounting in a drug-induced dream that goes off in a very Gonzo direction like something Hunter S. Thompson would write.

It's hard to say what all this means at this point, as Pynchon appears to be laying out his characters for events to come in the later chapters.  Mostly, he seems to be making a great satire in the spirit of Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  Slothrop is the poor American caught in the middle of all these intrigues that appear to revolve around pre-war behavioral studies, with bombed-out London serving  as a giant Petri dish for further experiments at the notorious "White Visitation."  Here, army behaviorists try to unlock Slothrop's deeply addled mind, which appears to predict where bombs hit through his many sexual encounters throughout the city.

Anyway, it's a fun break from all the electioneering taking place today, although if anyone could write a book about Trump's deeply addled mind it would be Pynchon, although I imagine he no longer has the energy for such ambitious efforts at age 83.

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