Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon’s masterpiece.

John Sutherland, Guardian

Thomas Pynchon gives us 20th-century fiction's finest memento mori.

John Sutherland, The Times

[A] masterpiece

Marc Chacksfield, ShortList

I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, f*ck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel

Tom McCarthy, author of 'C'

Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation.

Ian Rankin, Guardian

Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer.

Thomas Leveritt, Independent

Gravity's Rainbow is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted…[Pynchon’s] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels.

New York Times

He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy.

L.E. Sissman, New Yorker

Gravity's Rainbow is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated.

Washington Post