Down The Toilet And What Slothrop Found There...

[poliphilo]

All big, ambitious novels are boring in parts. This is what I tell myself as I inch my way through Gravity's Rainbow. Such novels aim to cover the whole range of human experience (it's one of the glories of the novel form that it can be expanded to take anything you want to cram into it)- and most readers are going to find that this includes material they really can't be bothered with- like the whaling trivia in Moby Dick or the historical theorising in War and Peace. Different readers will of course be bored by different things. If the novel is good enough the constant reader will set their shoulders and grit their teeth and carry on turning the pages.

Gravity's Rainbow really tried my patience with a dream/daydream/fantasy/astral planes sequence in which one of the characters jumped down a toilet and had adventures in the shifting otherworld he found down there. This, I thought, is self-indulgent and stupid. But perhaps it isn't. Perhaps it will have meaning reflected back on it by developments down the line. And even if that doesn't happen Pynchon has done enough by now to earn my respect and my indulgence. One has to trust one's author...

Comments

[flemmings]

I'd managed to forget Slothrup and the toilet bowl, largely because (unless my memory is totally demented-- googles: it's not) the same idea was used in the Ghanaian novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

[poliphilo]

And in the movie Trainspotting- as presumably in the book on which it's based.