An homage to Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

That's the first sentence of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a tale of the V-2 rocket, the Cold War, and, the imminence of death. I guess. Although I've read several of Pynchon's novels, I never made it quite through what most consider Pynchon's best; in fact, what many consider post-modern fiction's best. But after reading Gerald Howard's evocation of the novel, the 1973 era in which it burst into the world of American fiction, and the manner in which the great publishing houses worked back in the day, before...well...before, I think I'll give it another try and get past -- based on the marginalia in my copy -- page 132.

It's a timely piece in a way. With a tense London wondering where the next attack will come, but with no Slothrop and the location of his sexual conquests to help predict it.

But it's also a highly nostalgic piece. We used to be a nation that cared about books, including extremely difficult fiction.

Now the real problem presented itself: How to publish a seven-hundred-plus-page book at a price that would not be grossly prohibitive for Pynchon's natural college and postcollegiate audience. V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the '60s. Then I suggest we all commit suicide.) According to a letter from Cork Smith to Bruce Allen (who reviewed Gravity's Rainbow for Library Journal but wrote to Viking complaining about the novel's price), Viking would have had to sell thirty thousand copies at the then unheard of price of $10 just to break even. By comparison, V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had sold about ten thousand copies apiece in hardcover. So how to reach even a fraction of the cash-strapped Pynchon-loving millions? Cork himself hit on the then unique strategy of publishing an original trade-paperback edition at $4.95 and "an admittedly highly priced hardcover edition" at $15, each identical in paper stock and format, differing only in their binding. The gamble: "We also thought that Pynchon's college audience might, just might, be willing to part with a five-dollar bill for this novel; after all, that audience spends that amount over and over and over again for long-playing records." The other gamble was with the reviewers, who rarely took paperback fiction seriously, but as Cork wrote, "We feel—as, clearly, you do—that Pynchon cannot be ignored."

The Bookforum essay is worth taking a look at, if only to read the homages from other writers. We learn, for instance, that Don DeLillo, the other towering figure of Cold War fiction, was writing "Sears truck tire ads" when he first read another of Pynchon's novels, V.