Gravity's Rainbow: Part VII

I'll admit: I thought about not doing these anymore. I guess my attention span for writing about books I'm reading runs to six commentaries before I can't be bothered. But then I reread the previous parts and thought, "Why am I keeping from the world my superior perspective on this novel, infused with healthy dollops of confusion and mentions of re-reading entire sections three or four times (seven or eight if there's sex in them)?" And then my brain was all, "That's the narcissist I and five people on the Internet know and love! Keep at it, champion!"

My brain calls me champion because otherwise I'd spend a lot more time ignoring it than I already do. I mean, if I'm not going to listen to it warn me about computer viruses when I'm searching for Poison Ivy/Killer Croc cosplay porn the first five hundred times, why does it think I'll listen to it the next five hundred? But it keeps on trying! And how smart can it be anyway? Whose computer is almost entirely free of viruses?! That's right! The local Portland library's, that's whose!

The first sentence of this section describes Roger Mexico in a way that probably also describes me, "hunched Dracula-style inside his Burberry." By making that statement, I've now admitted to owning a Burberry coat. But I don't want you to get the idea that I know anything about fashion! I simply bought it for $20 from a used clothing store for a Philip K. Dick costume for a San Francisco themed New Year's Eve party. My entire thought process when purchasing it was this: "This will make me look like a mentally ill homeless person which is almost certainly what Philip K. Dick looked like on his better days!" Only later did I learn it was a fancy lad's coat when people would say things to me like, "Oh! I love your Burberry!" And I'd respond, "I don't have any blueberries."

I understand Pynchon's method of writing in a way in which I mean I don't actually understand a lot of it but I understand why he's writing it that way. I get it. He's entertaining himself in a lot of ways. He's saying things in ways he thinks are hilarious or poetic or interesting and couldn't give any number of fucks whether or not the reader understands it in the way he does. What I don't understand is how he found an audience doing this?! Seriously. Can somebody explain it to me so that I can get an audience as well? I suppose the difference is that Pynchon is incomprehensible in a way that makes you think, "He's way smarter than I am! If I carry this book around, people will think I'm that smart!" But I'm incomprehensible in a way that makes you think, "This guy is an idiot who admitted to wanting to suck Lobo's dick even though he couldn't quite tell if Lobo was super cool or reminded him of a clown and maybe it's because of both of those?! Also Grunion Guy doesn't have any books to carry around which is perfect because who would want to be seen with one? I'd rather be caught with an oversized coffee table book collecting the nastiest spreads from Oui magazine!"

Is that Oui coffee table book a thing you can be caught with because I'd like to order it on Amazon, please.

At one point in this section, Roger Mexico calls Jessica's boyfriend Beaver "Nutria." It's hilarious jokes like that which make me think, "How the fuck did I not realize this book was absolutely hilarious?!"

You can read that previous paragraph as completely earnest or totally sarcastic. I don't fucking give a shit.

This section tells the story of how Jessica and Roger met. Pynchon describes it as "what Hollywood likes to call a 'cute meet.'" Having only heard that phrase late in my life, I would have sworn it was a modern, 21st Century Internet term. I suppose I can still be surprised by some things! Some times you think life just can't offer up any more new things; usually that happens after your first sexual experience where your butthole is involved.

Christ, how terribly disappointing does my life sound when I describe learning that "cute meet" is an older expression as one of life's great surprises?

This is the section that describes Roger Mexico's discomfort working statistics for the Psi groups. He is searching for evidence of something outside the realm of the living via science and data. It seems a dismal hope for somebody without any psychic powers at all, working amid people who can seemingly do magic with their minds. Sure, he also works with Pointsman whose only super power is making dogs produce inordinate amounts of drool. So he's not totally alone in his inability to transcend reality. Although he's definitely not as passionate about his number crunching as Pointsman is about his stimuli.

Roger reminisces about his cute meet with Jessica as he and Jessica head into London to meet with Pointsman. As they're traveling through the streets, they pass by a recently rocketed neighborhood which gives us my favorite passage from this section:

"Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal . . . the value of n may be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later . . ."

Maybe that's not as good as the simple final two sentences of this section ("They are in love. Fuck the war.") but it's a nice description of the emotional attrition that violence and war and the constant threat of death will take on a person's psyche. It feels like the same kind of thing we're going through in America right now, minus the threat of instant death by V-2 with the incoming sound following.

This was a really nice section because it wasn't confusing and it was short. A short section in a Pynchon novel goes a long way. There's nothing more terrible than getting confused on the third page of a twenty page section and continuing on thinking, "I'll probably get a handle on what's going on any paragraph now!" Then you're twenty pages through it and you realize you're just going to have to give it another go. But this section could have gone on for twenty pages because it was straightforward! I think I understood it all! Roger Mexico is in love with a woman who could leave him at any moment because she's in a relationship with another man but his time with her is so magical and special that he's convinced himself that she feels the same way and he's ready to abandon everything to live a quiet domestic life with her in some hidden bombed out section of the city. He even has chickens in the bombed out garage!

It won't be for another section or so that we get inside Jessica's head to discover that she maybe isn't as all in on Roger as he is on her. Ha ha!

No wait! I take back that ha ha. It was cruel and cynical! But Roger maybe deserves me mocking him because he's really sort of put Jessica on a pedestal and might be more in love with the initial feelings of love and intimacy and the normality that the whole process of early courtship brings to his life after six years of war.