Four Grueling Months. One Nosebleed.

What do you gain after completing a four, or is it a five, month mindlessly difficult mission involving scouring through a book with over 400 interconnected characters, each carrying their own interconnected plot line? Is it a big feeling of relief? Is it knowledge? Is it blood on the cover caused by your friend Laura accidentally punching you in the nose while trying to shove a food particle in your nostril in the backseat of a bouncy van only 250 pages in? I still can't tell you. I don't understand the feeling. Never before have I finished a book and not known more about what transpired between pages 1 and 784.

I looked to Amazon and Wikipedia for clarification. What did I learn? Maybe after the 8th reading one begins to understand. Don't worry about not following the storyline and getting lost for a few pages here and there. Every person who claims to have read this book is lying.

Well I did read this book. But I feel like that is a lie.

Tyrone Slothrop, the story's main character (if you can call it that), a Harvard man trained in Pavlovian methods as a young young boy, reaches an erection every time he senses a rocket is about to land in his vicinity. Roger Mexico, haplessly in love with some girl named Emily, traces the rockets' landing points to a Poisson distribution scattered throughout London. I took a statistics course in college once. I don't remember what a Poisson distribution is. So I'll stick with the erections.

The problem is, I think Slothrop started having erections without the rockets. And Roger Mexico, well, I lost track of him somewhere along the way. Eventually, the story expands into a search for the one, true, and only Shwarzgërat rocket, number 00000. Slothrop dresses like a pig in Germany, beds a porn star and her 14-year-old daughter, characters named Enzian and Tantivy surface somewhere along the way, and a mess of pages and squares and numbers and names and places and run-on sentences and technical rocket jargon and Imnipolex G, a rare plastic, and the Army and the English and Europeans and poems and songs and more and more mingle into the picture and muddle with the brain.

Stories, as I was taught in every English class, follow an arc. This book, with the word "rainbow" in the title, should too. But searches for this rainbowed arc remain inconclusive. Too many nights spent being overwhelmed by its complexities and falling asleep after 2 sentences. Too many times knowing my energy level wasn't ready to pay attention to Pynchon's sentences for more than 2 minutes. Too many times tricking myself into believing that somehow, someway, this story would make up for itself and piece itself back together in time for me to form coherent thoughts about the words that lay in front of me. And yet I pulled through, experiencing my own emotional rainbow, peaking in the middle and falling down faster and faster until the inevitable crash at the very end. But the arc was complete. I just can't find it in the book. But maybe that's the point.

I don't know if I decided to keep reading this book more because I didn't have a promising "next up" on my nightstand or more because there weren't 200 pages of footnotes at the end, but I have finished it, and I feel like mashed potatoes. Maybe I can have a more fulfilling blog post after my 8th reread.