Thomas Pynchon is n’t exactly the most fertile author on the planet , but his output is still middling daunting in its downright weightiness and complexity . SoVulture has done the world a service , by ranking every Pynchon book from worst ( Against The Day ) to right ( The Crying of Lot 49 ) .
They make a strong case for the relatively slim Lot 49 being both his good record , and his most approachable to Modern readers . But they also make a really great argument for their # 2 plectron , Gravity ’s Rainbow , saying :
solemnity ’s Rainbow stands comfortably between Herman Melville ’s Moby - Dick and David Foster Wallace ’s Infinite Jest as the type of large , American book that dead on target fan will translate and reread to see what they miss the first clip around . The cobalt - succeeder for the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction ( along with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer ) sits at the top of the tidy sum of paranoid , postwar / Cold War masterpieces ( along the line of whole kit and boodle by Joseph Heller , Kurt Vonnegut , Rudolph Wurlitzer , and Don DeLillo ) that helped us visualize the senselessness that is war .
hold out the whole list , and the rationales , over at the link . [ Vulture ]
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