OK, I admit it: Gravity’s Rainbow was even less popular a choice for Fiction Lab than I could ever have imagined.
Book clubs, I am reliably and belatedly informed, are supposed to be about good clean fun, fairly easy reads and stimulating conversations amongst friends over a few drinks. Note to self: your average book club aficionado is not going to be too keen on a book with nine hundred pages of dense wording, disturbing sex, rampant paranoia, minimal plotting and maximum weirdness.
To celebrate our first year in existence, I had foolishly decided that Fiction Lab, my monthly book salon for scientific novels at London’s Royal Institution, was ready to take on something more challenging. After all, thanks to my sabbatical in Germany, we had a two month break to read something a bit longer than usual, and a certain Nature Network denizen had seemed unusually enthusiastic about this particular Thomas Pynchon classic. (Please note I am not apportioning blame – she did also warn me that it was not ‘book club material’). Add to that just the tiniest masochistic streak, and the fact that about a dozen people over the past two decades have kept nagging me to read it – well, I couldn’t help myself.
Gravity’s Rainbow is billed as an epic postmodern novel. Published in 1973, it’s loosely based around clandestine rocket technology development activities undertaken the German military in World War II. Several scientific themes are interwoven: mathematics, physics, the natural world, behavioral psychology, sexuality and of course, rocket science. Of historical note, the novel almost won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but a majority of the judging panel overturned the main jury’s decision on the grounds that the book was “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene”. Despite this, Gravity’s Rainbow won the US National Book Award in 1974; it has also inspired much scholarly scrutiny and debate and is considered by many to be his best work, and by some to be the greatest American novel of all time.
I started the book with plenty of time (in electronic form, on my Sony Reader – almost half a stone lighter than the paperback version), but was scuppered by the sheer beauty of the work. You simply cannot read Gravity’s Rainbow quickly; I found it breathtakingly lovely, erudite, bittersweet, romantic, funny and sad, and to race through it at a normal pace would be an unforgivable crime. When it became clear that I was only going to make it half way, I stopped altogether, rather than rush through and ruin the experience – I plan to finish it off at a leisurely pace over the next few months.
To their credit, everyone showed up on the night, but only two people had finished it. It inspired the most polarized response we’ve ever had – people literally either loved it or hated it – but to be honest, most fell in the latter camp.
For July’s meeting, we’ve chosen the perfect antidote for a Pynchon overdose: The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes by Anne Lingard. Set in Cumbria’s Lake District, the shifting mosaic of the narrative – we’re told – explores life, love and prejudice through three very different women: Ruth, a taxidermist; Madeleine, a widowed sheep-farmer; and, Lisa, an achondroplastic mathematician. As Lisa is drawn into the group it becomes clear that the other women have strange secrets: Ruth’s essays on embalming have an increasingly dark theme. This is billed as a story about harsh decisions: eugenics in the post-genomic age; the politics of marginalizing people and communities; the desperate responses to Foot & Mouth Disease; and the illogicality of human love.
The author, Ann Lingard, is a former parasitologist, a passionate proponent of getting more science into literature, and the founder of SciTalk. And she’s graciously agreed to travel down from deepest Cumbria on the night to discuss her book with the group. So it should be an entertaining evening: do join us if you can on Monday 6 July at 7 PM at the Royal Institution.
I loved it, but as you say, it can’t be rushed. I felt like I was speeding past beautiful scenery in the Cotswolds. Will have to go back and read it more slowly sometime.
Don’t listen to ‘em folks – it was awful! Or at least the first 45 pages that I struggled through were grim, mangled prose. I am shocked at Steffi Suhr! Shocked!
I’m secretly hoping that this:
might qualify as lablit. I hear the main character is an epidemiologist…
‘A host of half-zombie, half-vampire creatures start laying waste to New York’?
Hmmm.
Speaking of zombies, has anyone read this yet?
I have it on order, but one book in the same order that’s not published until September is holding it up.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a host of half-zombie, half-vampire creatures, when set loose in New York, will start laying waste to it.
“I have it on order, but one book in the same order that’s not published until September is holding it up.”
On Amazon? .ca or .com?
When I pre-ordered Experimental Heart, I also ordered Oliver Sacks’ Musicology, so that I would pay the same shipping but for 2 books instead of 1. But then they went ahead and sent me Musicology already, because someone’s book wasn’t ready yet. And I still only paid as if they were shipped together. But that was .com
.ca
I think the last time this happened they eventually shipped the in-stock books early, but it took a couple of weeks, which is OK by me because I have other books to read first!
I actually rather liked Gravity’s Rainbow when I read it in my graduate student days. More fun than integrating NMR spectra, anyway. For a brief dose of Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 is more digestible. And also has some science allusions.
As I say, I liked the book, and was happy to discuss why I liked it. I also freely admitted that I could undersand why some people wouldn’t, and that was fine. What intrigued me was the reaction of people like Stephen, who didn’t like it, but who seemed either incapable of understanding why anyone would, or were insistent that they shouldn’t.
I don’t think one can accurately judge a 900 page book if you’ve only read 45 pages. At least for me, it can take a while for a particular style to click in.
Or as Willie Dixon might have put it
In case anyone, like me, has never come across the word ‘achondroplastic’ (I did physics, okay?) – here’s my dictionary definition: ‘Affected with achondroplasia; of or relating to achondroplasia; of the nature of achondroplasia.’ That’s okay, then.
@Richard – What intrigued me was the reaction of people like Stephen, who didn’t like it, but who seemed either incapable of understanding why anyone would, or were insistent that they shouldn’t.
My remark above was, I hoped, very much tongue in cheek. ;-p
For the record, I don’t think that at any point in the fiction lab discussion I seriously denied the validity of anyone’s view who liked the book. And I recall saying then that I didn’t feel I could properly give it a score because I had only read the first 45 pages.
Brian, apparently the more common meaning of that word is not politically correct. I don’t want to get sued!
Damn, should I expect you to sue me, Stephen?
Jenny, how about “the politically incorrect term for ‘achondroplastia’ is ‘dwarfism’”?
Not quite. Achondroplasia is just one form of dwarfism. MeSH has a definition.
I have a very strong memory of a junior high school biology textbook defining the difference between ‘midget’ and ‘dwarf’ in technical terms, with former being reserved for growth-hormone deficient people whose proportions were normal. I think it’s fascinating how words become inappropriate over time.
I think inappropriateness is all about connotation. Words gather an accretion of negative connotation like a comet’s tail dragged along behind them. There comes a point when you just have to switch to a new word to avoid all that negative emotion the old word conveys.
pages of dense wording, disturbing sex, rampant paranoia, minimal plotting and maximum weirdness
After you did By The Sea, what’s not to like?
Achrondroplasia was the Greek goddess of those small pieces of fluff that collect conspiratorially beneath armchairs, and which are always just out of reach, but not so serious that you feel you have to get out the vacuum cleaner immediately – and so they continue to accumulate.
Pynchon makes you look like Beatrice Potter, Henry.
Pynchon makes you look like Beatrice Potter, Henry
Ah, you can say that becaue you don’t know Beatrix Potter like I know Beatrix Potter. That Old Mrs Rabbit was a bit of a goer. And Mr McGregor – well, the less said about his nocturnal activities in the potting shed, the better.
Didn’t you know that carrots should be planted at night?
It helps them see better.
Oh, you and your optically stimulated vegetables.
I forgot to mention in my post that I don’t think Gravity’s Rainbow is really a good example of hardcore lab lit. There are a few scientists thinking about science, but this is a bit peripheral. Lab lit lite, I think, on balance.
Thanks for this discussion. I have recently downloaded my first audio book to an iPOD (it is a rejected iPOD by a family member who has long since upgraded) and I’ve nearly finished it. My criteria for this form of “reading” are (1) long and (2) unabridged. I reckon GR is going to do the trick.
.
That Jane Austen book looks horrible. It’s been quite heavily advertised over here to my shudders of revulsion.
On the Amazon postage, they certainly do what Eva describes on .co.uk — if you order two and one is delayed, they send you the first one at no postage cost. But at .co.uk they have free postage on all books that cost £5 or more anyway, so it is quite hard not to qualify for that. Maybe if Jane Austen and the zombies is priced low enough, nobody will buy it
Sorry about the inadvertent strike-throughs – they are not supposed to be there.
don’t think Gravity’s Rainbow is really a good example of hardcore lab lit
Point.
Roger Mexico is my favorite scientist though, even if he is a statistician.
Maxine, how big is your iPod screen? I wonder if I could cope with a presentation that small – the Reader is good because it’s the size of a paperback. But I guess you can get used to the scrolling and stop noticing the boundaries that cage…and I know people read novels on mobile phones, so it must be possible.
Am I showing my age?
Maxine, I think the Zombies book has the potential to be quite hilarious. It’s like a cover version / remix of a favourite song – it could be great, or it could make you want to punch the perpatrator. I’ll let you know which one, when I get my hands on it!
@Jenny – Am I showing my age?
No, it’s just your eyesight, alas! Maxine wrote ‘audio book’.
FWIW, my iPod screen is far too small to read books, but I managed quite well with my iPhone screen for the first hundred pages or so of GR. But I bought a dead tree copy anyway so that I could read it more easily on the train and in the bath.
Stephen, it must be worse than I thought!
I’ve started Embalmer’s – so far rather atmospheric, and I’m already intrigued. Bob O’Hara would not like the cat-hating character, though. And what she does to the cats that soil her flower-beds…
Oh heavens, yes indeed, I have just dipped my toe in the water of the audio book format, how many years after everyone else? (An exception is listening to the excellent Stephen Fry versions of Harry Potter while on long car journeys with young children – pre-ipods of course.)
Reading books on screen – doubt I will ever become that advanced.
By the way, I read a review of A S Byatt’s Possession in the Guardian online by Sam Jordison – it is their book club choice this week. Have you tried that? It sounded quite scientific, from the review (or at least, about academics). Apologies if you’ve done it before and I have missed or forgotten previous discussions in the blog archives.
I loved ‘Possession’, but I can’t recall anything scientific in there. It’s a semi-epistolary tale of Victorian poets in love, and two present-day academics on their trail (also, eventually, in love).
So far, (in my opinion, natch) Gravity’s Rainbow beats Embalmer’s.
Jennifer
Not strictly scientific, more medical / psychiatric, but have you done, or thought of doing, Pat Barker’s Regeneration?
I’ll look into it, though have turned down several other medical nominations. There is so much medical fiction out there I don’t feel a strong need to help promote it.