I’m slowly working my way through this novel, which has a reputation for being a real mind-bender of a book. But while it is a big, wildly ambitious book, the basic set-up is not really that complicated. Part 1 is set around Christmas 1944 in war-torn London. There a special military operation for psychology research has been established at a hospital, “The White Visitation.” Researchers are experimenting with dogs (measuring Pavlovian responses), and there are  a batch of seances and mediums who appear to be aiding the military with ESP.

The book is rife with paranoia, whose source seems to be the war itself. The Germans are bombing London with a new rocket, the V2, which explodes before you hear the sound. (The title, Gravity’s Rainbow, is a reference to the parabolic arc a rocket takes as it is launched and then falls back to earth.) While Pynchon introduces scores of characters, only three or four are central to the action of part 1:

• Lt. Slothrop roams around London having sex with a variety of women. The core plotline of the book is that shortly after Slothrop sleeps with a woman, a V2 rocket explodes nearby. The plot of his sexual escapades/bombings is a Poisson distribution, and researchers are spying on Slothrop and trying to figure out the causal/correlative connection. Slothrop had some psycho-sexual research done on him as an infant, so perhaps he has been left with a kind of clairvoyance.
• Ned Pointsman is a creepy, Pavlovian researcher for the group, and he goes around collecting stray dogs for his experiments. He wants to experiment on a human, and thinks Slothrop would make a good subject.
• Roger Mexico is a statistician, and he’s involved with a woman, Jessica, who in turn is involved with another man.
• Pirate Prentice is some kind of clairvoyant. The book opens with him, but he drops off.

There are many other characters, and maybe they’ll prove to be more important, but the thing about this novel is that it’s not really so much about the plot as it is about one interesting scene after another. To enjoy the book, you really have to let go of this idea that there’s a coherent story, because incoherence is part of the point, I think. The style takes a while to get into — it slides around in perspective, and goes into almost stream-of-consciousness at times — but it also lends itself to a kind of juvenile humor. For instance, one scene involves Pointsman chasing after a dog among some rubble, and he steps into an errant toilet and gets his foot caught, so he’s clopping around alleyways with a toilet stuck to his leg. If that’s not funny, you won’t like this book.

From a geeky English major perspective, Gravity’s Rainbow might be the perfect postmodern novel because of the way it blends high and low culture — you get toilet jokes one minute, then explications of Rilke the next, then a lesson in statistics the next. And one motif is the idea of a “plot” — the characters are trying to uncover a coherent plot, to find a causal connection between events, but I’m not sure there is one. And the aimlessness of the novel reflects that causelessness.

I’m not sure if or when I’ll finish the book, but I did want to get some notes down while it’s fresh. Onward.

My short story, “A Storybook Home,” is in the current issue of The Normal School:

“They used to make love to keep warm.  They used to make love to kill time, to make up, to show off, to fight cancer.  Huddled together in Adams Morgan—cold nights after a meal in the Ethiopian restaurant along 18th, rats scurrying across the sidewalk near a young Cuban woman handing out fliers for a rave—they used to walk back to the Dupont Metro, go home and make love.”

I’ve just started dipping into the magazine, and it’s really stunning. Check it out regardless of my work.

This is one of the few Ford books I hadn’t read yet, and I picked it up after Casey’s post about The Ultimate Good Luck. Ford is one of my favorite living writers, and I think his strength is that he’s so intelligent yet so accessible. Here’s something he said in an interview:

I’ve been reading Libra [by Don Delillo]. A few weeks ago I read Atonement by Ian McEwan. They’re not alike, these two books, but they are wonderful books. Libra is a spectacularly smart book, and Atonement is, too. But I was on the plane with a guy today who was a doctor who loved to read. He was reading a Baldacci book. He said, “What are you reading?” I said, “Libra.” He said, “Is it a good book?” I said, “It’s a really good book.” And I thought to myself, If you read this book, you’ll stop on page five. And if you read Atonement, you’ll stop on page five. Now, I’m dying to read Libra – I haven’t read it before. But I don’t want people to do that with my books.

It has to do, in my mind, with the fact that writing for me is me working at the top of my abilities – because normally I think I’m right down in the warp and woof of ordinary life. Whereas I think a guy like Don is a real intellectual, and in order to make a book of his be as accessible as a book might be, he would have to do something he can’t do. I don’t want him to do it. I want him to write the books that he’s writing. But for that doctor from Escanaba, Michigan, to read Libra, something is going to have to happen that simply isn’t going to happen. I don’t think that devalues Don’s book at all.

On one hand, that’s an elitist thing to say, but I think he’s right in that DeLillo does work on a different plain. What I’d add, though, is that from his interviews I think Ford himself could hold his own in a conversation with DeLillo, but that kind of intellectual pretension doesn’t show up on the page of his fiction. His characters, as he says, are in the “warp and woof” of life.

Women With Men is a collection of three long stories (or novellas, whatever the term), two set in Paris and one set in Montana. The Montana story, “Jealous,” will be familiar to fans, but it was my least favorite story in the collection because it feels like a rehash of the Rock Springs stories or Wildlife. The Paris stories, “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals,” are sad and maybe not Ford at his best, but I enjoyed them. At their core, I’d say the stories are about the failure of communication between men and women, and maybe the source of that failure is something within the character that the character doesn’t realize himself. For instance, the man in “The Womanizer” abandons his wife after an argument, and the true source of the argument isn’t spelled out for us. He’s getting older, and is maybe unsatisfied with certain things. I’d have to read it again to better articulate what I’m thinking here.

I will say that overall I enjoyed the collection, and Ford strikes me as one of our most American writers. In a way, these Paris stories felt like Ford taking on Henry James, the innocents abroad motif. The American men in Paris have a scruffy American pragmatism, and optimism, that doesn’t jive with the foreignness around them. Therein lies some tension. This is not the Paris of Hemingway, with its bohemian Left Bank. Rather, in Ford’s stories, Paris is dirty and cold and unwelcoming, and his characters get into trouble there. (But his characters get into trouble in the Montana story as well.)

The reviewers are right: this is one of the best political novels I’ve ever read. I picked up the novel shortly after Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, and I can see why a writer of this caliber would win such a prestigious award. The Feast of the Goat, which explores the last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, presents us with really big political themes without sliding into didacticism. Vargas Llosa maintains complexity in the narrative, which I think is crucial for any work of art tackling politics.

I’ll be honest and say I didn’t know anything about Trujillo before I started this book. I recognized his name, but he seems to have fallen through the cracks of history, unlike Castro or Pinochet. And it seems as though Vargas Llosa is faithful to the truth. The novel has three storylines — mainly set up in an A, B, C, A, B, C pattern: (1) a woman, Urania, returns to the island in the ’90s (the novel came out in 2000) to visit her ailing father, who was once a powerful senator in Trujillo’s regime. Urania has been living in exile for 30 years because of some secret involving her father and Trujillo. This narrative is a complete fiction, but it provides Vargas Llosa a way to provide a retrospective scope. (2) Trujillo himself, on the day he was assassinated. In Vargas Llosa’s interpretation, Trujillo is fascinating and sinister, unsympathetic but engaging. (3) The final “perspective” follows the plotters themselves, roughly a chapter for each point of view — four assassins, a few backup assassins, a few connected in the political realm. Here Vargas Llosa draws on real individuals, though I’m not sure how much artistic license he takes.

What emerges from this pattern is a complex picture of a Latin American dictatorship. I haven’t read many dictator novels, but the form is fascinating to me. While the form is mainly found in Latin American fiction, I think the trope could be applied more broadly to, say, Moby-Dick or Absalom Absalom, novels whose central theme is unchecked power. In The Feast of the Goat, the complexity emerges in that, according to Vargas Llosa, Trujillo did some good things to turn the wild island nation into a functioning Republic, but by the ’50s his crimes outweigh the progress. The novel is especially interesting today because of the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions and because of the way Vargas Llosa treats the post-Trujillo power vacuum. He wrote the novel before Iraq and Afghanistan, but one wishes our political leaders had studied The Feast of the Goat during their decision-making processes.

This is my last word on Walker Percy for now, a commentary piece in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Chris Arnold has an interesting review at The Rumpus of Chris Adrian’s The Great Night.

On Mark’s recommendation, I read this novel and agree completely with his sentiments. Briefly, the story is about some expatriates in Italy after WWII. The narrator, Peter, drives down to visit his old school friend, Mason, who is independently wealthy and partying it up with movie stars. There, Peter encounters another man in that circle, Cass. During Peter’s first night in town, everyone gets rip-roaring drunk, there are some spats, and the next day a woman has been raped and Mason is dead. The police wrap it up and say Mason raped her and committed suicide, case closed.

A few years later, Peter visits Cass in North Carolina to uncover the truth. The structure of how the narrative unfolds is interesting, because it’s almost entirely in a series of flashbacks. In the first half of the novel, Peter’s narrative develops the character of Mason and Mason’s side of that evening, and the second half of the novel is essentially Cass telling his story. And I think that structure, while interesting, is what ultimately makes the novel a magnificent failure, or whatever Faulkner’s phrase was.

Yes, there are some scenes that could edited, but even more troubling, the book could use a good line-editing page by page, because reading it I didn’t get a sense of an author. I felt like I was reading Norman Mailer, a big expansive overdone narrative that has these great moments but that left me not really knowing what to say about Styron the artist. I kept wishing Peter would just disappear the way Zuckerman disappears on Roth’s ’90s work. Peter does disappear, but he’s still there as a conscious listener, which is clunky.

Overall: I’m glad I read it, and will probably read more Styron, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it without Mark’s caveat that it could stand to be 150 pages shorter.