At the End of Gravity's Rainbow

After six weeks of determined struggle, I've finally made it to the end of Gravity's Dictionary (the Pynchon postmodern classic, known to most as Gravity's Rainbow). It's one of those books that you don't read so much as live through (or survive), your friends and family meanwhile asking "Where's he been? Oh, wait, right; he was reading that Pynchon thing . . ." and then you emerge from the study door, like Rod Taylor in The Time Machine (1960 George Pal version), wheezing and hypoxic—in tatters, sartorially and psychologically—every brain cell screaming to its neighbors: "I've got blisters on my fingers!"

Rod Taylor (as H.G. Wells) enters the dining
room after returning from the year 802,701,
in The Time Machine (1960).

Certainly one of the more challenging works of English I've ever read (even admirers of the novel have been known to say reading it is "admittedly a slog . . ."; see a book excerpt here), Gravity's Rainbow sets a high water mark for inscrutability, at least among American authors. (We must give a nod to Joyce here.) Pynchon's style is unrelentingly baroque and macaronic, truncheoning the reader alternately with French, German, and English, layering engineering concepts atop scatological neologisms atop organic chemistry references atop acronyms, with frequent (and annoying) recourse to made-up song lyrics (please, Mr. Pynchon, curb your doggerel), switching from mimesis to diegesis the way Lady Gaga changes stage outfits. Of course, it's all good clean fun until someone loses a mind. Some idea of the vexation the book provokes can be inferred from the fact that despite a unanimous recommendation by the Fiction Jury (consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alfred Kazin) to award the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Pynchon, the larger Pulitzer committee overruled its own fiction judges and gave the 1974 fiction prize to—no one.

Whether Gravity's Rainbow deserves to be ranked among the greatest novels ever written (it has made more than one reviewer's "Top 100" list) is certainly open to debate. Whether it can even properly be called a novel is open to debate. (Well-known NYC book editor Gerald Howard once said of the putative classic it is "not a novel in the generally accepted sense—it is a text, intended for moral instruction.") If you come looking for a plot, you won't find one. There are bits and pieces of story, but in the end, Gravity's Rainbow is about as much an example of storytelling as head cheese is an example of meat. It's more of an accretion of vignettes and daydreams held together with digressions and song lyrics. Should we even bring up the matter of character arc? The main character (the bumbling, oversexed polymath, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop) simply vanishes around 50 pages from the end of the 776-page book.

Pynchon's classic is not without its serious detractors. One reviewer, Walter Kirn, writing for Slate, took up

. . . the question of whether Pynchon's writings are intended for normal human beings. I don't think they are. They partake of what the Elizabethans called "euphuism"—the pursuit of linguistic complexity for its own sake. As such, they're intended for literary monastics, for the tenured priesthood of paid interpreters that sprang up in colleges after World War II with the help of massive public funding from schemes such as the GI Bill and Pell grants. This professional audience for difficult "texts" created the demand that Pynchon first filled with V. and Gravity's Rainbow, the semiotic monoliths whose mix of scientific imagery, Cold War absurdity, and Joycean allusion provided a kind of full-employment program for a generation of rising postdocs.

One can't help but hear in such shrill attacks the voice of the learned classical-music critic trying to come to grips with modern jazz. Would someone who has known only Haydn and Beethoven be competent to pass judgment on an Ella Fitzgerald scat, or a Keith Jarrett Köln Concert? Shall we criticize Miles Davis for not knowing how to carry a melody? Bill Evans for not knowing how to root a chord?

One critic (Dan Schneider) slammed Gravity's Rainbow for its lack of emotional impact, stating "it’s remarkable to think how utterly emotionally unaffecting the book is." This comes much closer to the mark, I think, because it's hard, actually, to recall a novel in which there are so many sex scenes, with so little passion in any of them. Indeed, Pynchon has a curious gift for creating colorful characters that lack life. The villains are flimsy (and of course it's perfectly okay that we make them sexual deviants, since they are Nazis, after all), the sympathetic characters conspicuously unsympathetic; the hero himself unremittingly bland. Slothrop, Pointsman, Eventyr, Tchitcherine, Mucker-Maffick, and the rest are all not just cardboard characters, but soggy, pissed-on cardboard. They materialize and dematerialize throughout the story like apparitions, wearing their affectations like paper armbands, making the masked extras in Eyes Wide Shut seem complex in comparison. (It's telling, I think, that as celebrated an epic as Gravity's Rainbow is, no attempt has ever been made to bring it to the big screen.)

Ostensibly, this is a book about war (World War II), and yet there are no battle scenes (only a hint of a firefight late in the book, amounting to nothing). All of the personnel are stationed in the rearmost of rear areas, Lieutenant Slothrop's most daring venture being a jaunt through Switzerland in the spring of 1945 (followed by a riverboat adventure that brings him, rather late, to Peenemünde). The V-2 rocket, and Slothrop's allusory erections, are the star of the show. We get to hear a great deal about guidance systems, Poisson distributions, dyes and propellants, the incestuous pre-war relationship between American and European industrial conglomerates; we even get Pynchon's charming account (via a parable involving one Byron the Light Bulb) of how incandescent filament life was balanced against the cartel-set price of tungsten and electric power company economic reality. But we see precious little of the human emotional toll of war that, for example, Tolstoy would have shown us. Even Vonnegut and Heller (with all their hyperbolic, tragicomic absurdism) were able to paint a more vivid, lasting, high-emotional-impact picture of World War II than Pynchon has managed to do in Gravity's Rainbow.

The inevitable comeback is "Well but you see now, that's just the point, isn't it? War is a dehumanizingly banal enterprise, in the end; the bureacratic machinery of armed conflict is fundamentally numbing to the spirit, and you can't really expect . . ."

Oh, but we can expect. Slaughterhouse Five. Catch-22. War and Peace. (Dare I say it? M*A*S*H.) We can expect more, much more, from a war story, even a humorously told one, I'm afraid.

Criticisms aside, Gravity's Rainbow will always have a special place in my heart, if for no other reason than its success in refuting the iron-clad dicta of the NYC publishing elite, who demand that a novel have compelling characters with well-defined character arcs, strong plot and subplots (with well-timed reversals), a timely theme, a well-defined genre, and all the rest—all hog-swill, basically. Somehow, Thomas Pynchon gave the finger to all that, and got away with it. No doubt there are other Pynchons out there right now, nascent meisters of the written word struggling to be heard above the white noise of Amazon ratings, Goodreads reviews, Bookbub "featured book" placements, und so weiter. We can only hope some of them will be discovered—and properly celebrated—while there are still those of us who remember how to read more than 140 characters at a time.

Script-Doctoring The Station Agent

Thomas McCarthy's offbeat, low-budget (under $500,000) drama, The Station Agent, is a bit of an enigma. The 2003 film won numerous awards (critics and judges lavished praise on it), 90% of people on rottentomatoes.com liked it (average rating 3.9/5), and yet I didn't find it to be all that magical; I give it three stars, tops. Does it exude charm? Most definitely. Are the performances good? Hell yes, they're better than good. (So is the cinematography.) But somehow, long portions of the movie seemed to drag; the funny parts weren't laugh-out-loud funny; the plot was threadbare; my thoughts wandered as I watched. I wanted to come away laughing or crying or moved in some way. But it's not that kind of story.

What kind of story is it? The logline is suitably quirky: Two loners (Joe and Olivia) try to befriend an antisocial dwarf (Finbar McBride, sensitively played by Peter Dinklage) who has inherited an abandoned train station in Newfoundland, New Jersey.

Joe, Olivia, and Fin watch a movie in The Station Agent.

Bitter and reclusive, tired of living the wee life in a world of Big People, four-foot-five-inch Finbar moves into the ramshackle station, making it his own special locomotive-geek bachelor pad. But he can't get away from the young Cuban-American man, Joe (played by Bobby Cannavale), who operates a hot dog truck near the abandoned station. (We're never told how it is a person can make a living operating a lunch truck at an abandoned station where no train ever stops.)

While walking to town, Finbar almost gets struck by a swerving Jeep; he thus meets Olivia Harris (played by Patricia Clarkson), a thirty-something woman who lost her only child in a playground accident two years ago and is now separated from her husband.

For a while, it seems as if Fin and Olivia will hit it off and become An Item, but they never do. Instead, she wants to reconcile with her husband (but finds out much later that he's already impregnated his girlfriend). Fin also meets a young librarian, and has a tender moment with her; but alas, she's pregnant by her redneck boyfriend, and she goes back to him (or disappears from the film, at least).

There's a bit of bonding between Fin and Joe, but frankly the Joe character is mostly an irritation (to Fin and the moviegoer) and only barely attains "true friend" status at the end of the story. He's good-natured; you want to like him; but he's extraordinarily immature for a grown man. He makes the characters in Saturday Night Fever seem complex, multidimensional.

What the movie needs is a good train wreck, whether kinetic (i.e., literal) or metaphorical. (I'd take either.) Joe's life is mysteriously thin (he's as complex, emotionally, as a 10-year-old boy); apparently he has no college loans to pay, no wife or child to feed, nothing to do with his time but hang out at the station all day. Olivia's life is full of pathos, but it's latent, rarely overt. Who are these people? Where are the raging crises in their lives? Olivia lost her son two full years ago; it's in the past; her husband is not the kind of husband any sane woman would want to reconcile with. Where's the tension? There isn't any. I'm sorry.

The main character's arc takes him from bitter and antisocial to less bitter and quasi-social (but still without a love life). That's hardly a satisfying journey.

How to fix this mess? First, make all three main characters' lives train wrecks. Not only that, actually have Joe hang his head at one point and call his life a train wreck so that Fin (the locomotive-history uber-nerd and consummate train-lover) can say: "Please don't ever say that in my presence."

Joe: "What? What'd I say? You mean . . . train wreck??"

Fin: "Please. It's . . . repugnant."

Joe (whose first language is Spanish) gives a no-comprende shrug.

"Re-pug-nant. It means repulsive. Extremely distressing."

This sets up "train wreck" as a metaphor that can be used throughout the movie, while also potentially setting up a funny moment some time later on, when Olivia can slip "train wreck" into conversation (innocently), whereupon both Joe and Fin stare at her and simultaneously say: "Don't ever say that." (Then Joe, on his own: "It's repugnant.")

Writer-director McCarthy took pains to show a scene in which the local-store cashier/owner whips her cell phone out to take a picture of Fin while he's walking around in the store (because apparently, this 50-year-old woman has never seen a dwarf before, in her entire life). Okay, we get it, people treat dwarves like freaks. Unfortunately, McCarthy misses a great opportunity to lend resonance to the store scene later on, when Fin, in a drunken rage, stands on a bar stool in a crowded saloon and yells at people to "Go ahead, look at me." What he should, of course, have done is yell: "Get your camera out, okay? Take a goddam picture." At first, no one moves, but Fin (in my rewrite; if I were script-doctoring this thing) shames the crowd into actually getting their cell phones out. He forces them to take actual pictures of him.

That's not all. Bear in mind, there's a hugely important redemption scene near the end of the movie when Fin, glad to be alive after a near-death experience, finds the nerve to stand in front of an elementary-school class (one kid asks how tall he is) to give a talk about trains. The barroom scene could have given the classroom scene a bit of much-needed resonance if it (the bar scene) had ended with Fin (duly photographed by the shamed saloon crowd) stepping down from the bar stool and saying (angrily, of course) "Thank you. Class dismissed . . ." as he storms out of the bar. Later on, during the classroom scene, we could have Fin allow a local newspaper reporter (newspapers being a symbol, incidentally, for well-past-their-glory-days 19th-century technology, like trains) to take a picture of him with kids gathered around him. The next day, Joe, Olivia, and Fin (or any combination of two of them) could be looking at the picture in the morning paper, commenting positively on it, etc. 

Note: The camera is a potentially powerful metaphor in any movie; it's the physical incarnation of voyeurism (which in turn is a powerful motif in cinema).

Fin's closeness with Olivia could have been better exploited. They could have cuddled/rubbed faces, on the bed, fully clothed; then CUT TO an outdoor scene (continuous, night) looking at the bedroom window from outside; we see the light go out (suggesting that more may have then happened on the bed). But we FADE TO a morning indoor scene where we see the two spooning, still fully clothed, atop the still-undisturbed bed, Fin looking like a pearl inside an oyster with Olivia holding him from behind.

I can think of a lot of seemingly little (but potentially important in the aggregate) fluorishes that would have made us care more about the characters (without resorting to the cheap tactic of making them have sex with each other)—quite possibly making for a more satisfying (for me, anyway) film experience. With a little work, The Station Agent could have been even better than it is already. That's not to take credit away from Thomas McCarthy, however. Few people these days can shoot an award-winning, highly profitable (well over $8 million gross) drama for under half a million dollars. That's magic of a pretty high order. Far be it for me to suggest otherwise.