I just finished GR. It wasn't the worst thing ever but holy crap was it overhyped. It had a lot of legitimately humorous, impressive, or moving scenes but there is no connecting tissue in between. 60% of the scenes in the book were just narratively isolated, grotesque, or thematically irrelavant. Again, not horrible.
I'm not some STEM pleb who just hopped in the deep end, here, I've read a lot of bizarre, long, and complex stuff but none of those things were bizarre, long, and complex just for the sake of it--just to be the "ultimate" postmodern novel. The style of a novel should entice, manipulate, guide, and provoke the reader; not berate them. "Blood Meridian," for example, is a long, dense, and stylistically obscure book that nonetheless uses these tools to draw the reader into a sense of desolation and ultimately deliver a powerful apocalyptic meditation on the evil of man.
I would be willing to bet that well over 50% of the people who have picked up GR haven't finished it and over 50% just pretend to like/"get" it because they seem dumb if they don't. The very definition of a meme book. I think when it came out it was so impenetrable that there was an academic race to comprehend it and people needed to act they were mining greater and greater depths from it in order to be smarter than the crowd. Eventually this behavior spread to an imageboard for anime enthusiasts and suddently you're a pseud.
Anyways, if you like GR feel free to expound on its virtues and if you didn't like it, explain why. I won't judge either of you guys, I'm just trying to get more perspectives here.
Perhaps you're just colorblind and couldn't appreciate all the colors of the rainbow
Justin Wilson
...holy...
Leo Ross
>Thinking Blood Meridian even compares to GR
Levi Scott
>the style of a novel should... imma stop right there.
Levi Davis
> but there is no connecting tissue in between
Perhaps there is something, or nothing to this 'hollowness'
If one of your biggest gripes is stylistic, aesthetic, 'storyness', and then you compare it to: "Blood Meridian,"
a book I have not read, but at least know loosely it has to do with indians and stuff.
The content of gravities rainbow alone then, related to the content of Blood Meridian, could be argue to be more, interesting, pertinent, vast, complex, (of course maybe this cannot be argued), that if those are the two main forms of criteria, and then would would attempt to argue which if any could ever be of more value, and so on and so on
Grayson Nelson
This is the exact sort of response that I find unsatisfying. A lot of people make these sort of statements like "GR is so great! It will blow your mind!" but I've yet to see a truly convincing appreciation of it. That's not to say that there isn't one or that no one actually likes it but it's disappointing to someone trying to appreciate it more. Piling superlative on superlative doesn't explicate the novel any.
There's a lot of "It's so tonally wild!" and "It breaks boundaries between high literature and pedophilia!" but no explanation as to why those things are valuable or GR is the superlative example of them. Semi-jokingly, I think Western lit was getting along just fine before Pynchon graced us with a scene of a woman shitting into an old man's throat.
Justin Kelly
Harold Bloom think so, so....
Wyatt Robinson
just sit on it for a few months and you'll understand the appeal as the concepts mellow in your mind. the best post-modernist lit i've found plants a few ivy seeds in your mind and they catch you as you take time to let them grow in your noggin. i get it though, not everyone can be the gaddsmaster. pynch tried. maybe you just didn't like it. you don't have to, though i understand the frustration of watching people enjoying something that you just can't seem to get a taste for. it's an odd envy.
Asher Flores
>I think Western lit was getting along just fine
It was, and is, and out of all books that have been and will be and could be created, it is 1,
how many good books do you think have been failed to be written because gravitys rainbow came out?
