Gravity's Rainbow/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Award Snub: The Pulitzer Prize committee awarded the book a prize in 1974, but were overruled by the Pulitzer board, who called it "turgid and overwritten."
    • Pynchon did this in reverse when he won the National Book Award, sending Irwin Corey to accept the award in his place.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Freeing Der Springer from a German prison by crashing an ocean liner into it.
  • Squick: Where to start? Slothrop's adventures in a nightclub toilet bowl; the early sexual experiments on infant Slothrop involving Imipolex G; Pudding's coprophagia; Blicero's threesomes with Gottfried and Katje; the possibility that Franz's girl may be his long lost daughter; Gottfried being built into a rocket.
    • Used Symbolically, no less!
  • True Art Is Angsty: The only coherent unifying themes are death and paranoia.
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: In terms of scope, chapters skipping across time and place and the general weirdness
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: Arguably even more so than with Pynchon's other novels.