Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon. It is long and intricate, with a large cast of characters, and its action takes place mainly in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Its central thread is the design, production and launch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and above all the search for a mysterious device, the "Schwarzgerät" ("black device"), which is meant to be installed in a rocket bearing the serial number "00000".

The novel draws on an enormous range of knowledge and repeatedly crosses the boundaries between high and popular culture, between literature and the profane, and between science and speculative metaphysics. Its themes include preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity and entropy, many of them already present in Pynchon's earlier fiction but handled here with far greater virtuosity. The characters and narrators are never able to settle what the historical circumstances around them really are, least of all the Holocaust, and this lasting uncertainty creates much of the book's dramatic tension against the weight that their actions carry in the common memory of that period.

Pynchon worked on the book through the 1960s and early 1970s, while living in California and Mexico, and kept revising and adding to the manuscript up to the moment it went to press. Some characters come from his earlier novel V. (1961). The book won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, shared with a collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer, although Pynchon declined the prize. It was also chosen for the Pulitzer Prize, but the advisory board rejected it on account of its content, which some members judged unreadable and obscene, so no fiction prize was awarded that year.

Over time it has become one of the defining works of literary postmodernism. TIME included it among the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and several critics, Harold Bloom among them, regard it as one of the great American novels. It has also generated a substantial body of commentary, reader's guides and essays.