Reply #5: I love Pynchon first in the morning.

[Chan790]

First things first. Don't start with Gravity's Rainbow, it's unwieldy until you grasp Pynchon's writing style. Start with either Crying of Lot 49 (which is as unwieldy to read but a lot shorter. If you have to read it twice, it's still less of a trial.) or Mason and Dixon (which is about the same length, but with the exception of a few sections is absolutely straight-forward.)

It's not a matter of too dumb, for most people it's a matter of too literal. Read it like poetry the first time through, be less concerned what individual sentences mean as opposed to what they convey or make you feel. You will still get the story.

As for being a difficult book? Yeah. Entire graduate level courses on contemporary lit are taught on this one novel. It's worth it though, it really is. On a serious deliberate thorough read, it usually takes me about six off-and-on months to read it. Read it the way serious literature students read it: really slow and taking notes so if you have to set it down for a while (it's mentally draining to read) to read something lighter and less mentally straining then you can pick up where you left off with less effort. Also, it's hard to keep track. It's a novel with 900 major and minor characters. Minor characters disappear for 200 pages only to return suddenly in a critical capacity (much like life, people from the past pop up unexpectedly.) leaving you scurrying back 7 chapters going "who the f*ck was X again?"

It's an awesome novel, it just takes a commitment to get through it without wanting to find Thomas Pynchon and punch him in the nose for torturing his readers. (I'm convinced this is why he uses a grainy HS-age black-and-white photo as his publicity still; so people cannot track him down and beat him up.)

Also, it's been a while but I think that sentence actually describes an industrial-age factory and the horrible lives of its' creators and "parishioners". It's a recurring theme for Pynchon, the degradation of man by fanatical devotion to industry; capitalism as the new god. He is generally considered by literary theorists and critics to be a "socialist writer" though his actual political beliefs are AFAIK unknown.