Season three kicks off with a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Thomas Pynchon's postmodernist whirl-a-gig Gravity's Rainbow. Originally published on February 28, 1973, this encyclopedic inquiry into the systematicity of existence, power, and technology was just this week described by Esquire as "one of the weirdest, richest, most frustrating, inscrutable, brilliant, gorgeous, exhilarating, inexplicable, disgusting, hilarious, remarkable, and goddamn frustrating again novels ever published in America"---a novel so discombobulating, in fact, that the Pulitzer board refused to award it the fiction prize it assuredly deserved for its sheer display of ambition and erudition. Ostensibly about an American Army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual adventures in World War II-blasted London predict German V2 rocket bombings, Gravity's Rainbow encompasses so much more than a plot. With nearly 400 (often wackily named) characters and wild tangents into shadowy conspiracies hatched by secret organizations with names like ACHTUNG and PISCES, the narrative tries to find some natural humanism within the wide battery of political bureaucracies and regulatory bodies that administrate lives and minds. As we decide, Pychon's heart is always with the counterforce, with those who by letting their lives run counter to the machine transcend the inevitable rainbow's arc of precision that's meant to keep us all in our place and the trains running on time. Love it or hate it, Rainbow's Gravity feels like riding a rocket: we can only strap in and feel the G-force.
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Episode 8: Beloved and Ghosts of the Past, the Present, and Possibly the Future
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