Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Reading Order

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is the most demanding and most celebrated of the postmodern American novels — a 760-page exploration of the final months of World War II and its aftermath, centered on the V-2 rocket trajectories over London and the mysterious statistical correlation between the sexual adventures of Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, an American intelligence officer, and the sites where German rockets will fall. The novel won the National Book Award (in a tie) and was recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the jury, whose recommendation was overturned by the Pulitzer board (who found it 'unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene'). Pynchon's range of reference — to chemistry, calculus, operant conditioning, film, jazz, colonialism, rocket science, entropy, paranoia, and conspiracy — is staggering; his prose shifts registers from comic vaudeville to lyrical elegy within a sentence. Gravity's Rainbow is the great white whale of American literary ambition: the most discussed, most imitated, and most unfinished novel in the American postmodern tradition.