The National Book Award wants you vote for the best of six award winning choices.
- The Stories of John Cheever
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
- The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
I won’t tell you who was winning when I voted, but I will say it was the one I picked.
Dare I say it was every Calvinist’s favorite Catholic?
You dared to say it!!
And I dared to vote, too!
If anybody’s read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ please raise their hand.
– I’m always puzzled to see the obscure novels (books) that make these lists. (By obscure I mean books almost no one has read; unless forced to by taking some course.)
Not me. I think I’ve only heard of it through this blog.
Not only have I read Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve read all of Pynchon’s books at least twice. I’ve completed a cover-to-cover reading of GR at least 6 times in the past 15 years.
P.S.–Gravity’s Rainbow might well be considered “obscure” outside of the Literary World. Inside the Literary World, however, it is a towering novel that casts a shadow over the terrain to the point that for the past 35 years since its publication it has been become the benchmark for judging any new novels of sufficient ambition and/or innovation, especially here in the United States. The six finalists were chosen BY other winners of the National Book Award, so you can see that to be chosen among the finalists came from those whose exposure level to fiction is top-notch.
You’ve read it six times, have you? Are you actually Thomas Pynchon hiding behind a pseudonym? I mean, “Alex,” what an obviously fake name.
I’m just being silly. I do wonder about your claim on the importance of Gravity’s Rainbow. Why isn’t it on Random House’s list of top 100 best novels? It is on the reader-submitted list, but so are four Ayn Rand books and two from L. Ron Hubbard, which seems a bit too thick.
I’m not Pynchon hiding behind some concocted sobriquet–nice try. Yes, I’ve read it at least 6 times since 1993 (I don’t know the actual count and once back to back with Joyce’s Ulysses…my brain hurt for a couple of weeks after) For the record, I picked it up independently–no one forced me to read it. I can’t answer why it’s not on Random House’s 100 list (most are pre-1970, interestingly); Time Magazine, however, had it on their list of the best between 1923 and 2005. It is interesting to read reviews of successive novels since 1973 (right to present) that were compared to GR and/or how many of those writers cite Pynchon as an influence. Franzen, David F. Wallace, Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel 2004), to name a few, all fall in either or both categories.
So, is GR as much fun to read as Ulysses? Should I rush out to get it?
Alex, what do you think of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice? The Wall Street Journal completely savaged it.
I’m in the midst of my second read of IV and it’s easily his lightest, funniest, and easiest to read. When I heard the initial reports long before it was published of it being a “detective novel”, I chuckled–Pynchon doing a “noir” or “gumshoe”? Hahaha! I think it’s a lark and a fun “challenge” on Pynchon’s part–his previous two novels were very long (900 page average) and well-researched that likely both took several years to write. IV comes off like that collegiate summer gym class–more fun than a serious endeavor, as if he simply wanted to see if he could write one. And I’m guessing it took him less than a summer semester to write, too, which hardly surprises me after two behemoth ones.
No, don’t rush out to buy GR–especially if it’s your first try at a Pynchon novel. If you’re interested at all, try his 1966 The Crying of Lot 49 first–much shorter and gives a glimpse of his style to come. Yes, in parts, GR is as much fun (especially the limericks sprinkled about) as Ulysses, but it does have scenes that will make the sensitive souls (and stomachs, too) squirm and, quite possibly, sickened…reader beware.
Alex, what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?
I am a data coordinator for a medical supply company…why do you ask?
Because of your knowledge of the subject at hand. I guess it shows my bias that I assumed you were an academic. I try not to assume things like that.
Gotcha. I can see where that impression could be made, but I don’t take offense. I consider myself an independent Lit aficionado and Pynchon just happens to be one of the authors I’ve gravitated toward over the last 20 or so years. Also, since 1995 as a self-imposed project, I’ve been (slowly) reading all the National Book Award fiction winners and have managed to read 50 of them to date. I have read three of the six finalists and think all the writers are worthy of winning and reader respect.
Can you name any winners whose work doesn’t measure up to the award, in your opinion?
The ones that come immediately to mind are: Field of Vision by Wright Morris, Paris Trout by Pete Dexter, News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck, and Spartina (the weakest of the bunch) by John Casey.
Having read the Wiki entry on Gravity’s Rainbow I think I’ll give it a pass. (I couldn’t even get through the article.)
A tiny sample (not from the synopsis, which is many pages long);
“Though the novel has been praised for its innovation and complexity, this acclaim has come with controversy. In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported Gravity’s Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene.”
Ah, yes, the infamous Pulitzer flap. I think it speaks for itself and requires no further comment.
I wasn’t going to speak directly about the Pulitzer decision so as a side note to refute the claim of “obscurity”, as recently as Wednesday, a British gambling site (Ladbrokes) has Pynchon as a 9-1 pick to win the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s been rumored (as such things are supposedly sealed for 50 years) that Pynchon has been short-listed for the prize more than once over the past 10-20 years. Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow did win the William Dean Howell’s medal in 1975, a year after the Pulitzer flap. Pynchon, however, declined the medal.