Fiction Mondays: Rainy September Check-In

Today marks the first check-in date for Rainy September, and I am currently ahead of schedule! So I thought today, I would post some thoughts on the first 70 pages (or so) of the novel. So if you don't want to hear my thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow, skip on ahead. But if you do...

There's a really interesting scene in these pages, toward the end of these pages, in which Pointsman, the Pavlovian doctor, worries that Roger Mexico, the statistician, and the rest of his generation will live outside of cause and effect after the war. This is severely terrifying to a Pavlovian, to whom cause and effect are essential:

"Will Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next?"

And the answer, according to the plot and structure of the novel, is yes. We jump from event to event, character to character, often with no link between. The mystery of Tyrone Slothrop (every place he has sex, a rocket hits) is picked apart by a group of pseudo-scientists and psychics trying to understand the reason, and the question they cannot answer is which is the cause and which is the effect. I really love how Pynchon mirrors this confusion in the structure of the book, for instance: Slothrop's extended hallucination (toward the end of these pages) is not explained until the next section. We are left flailing, hoping that the cause of this hallucination will be explained.

As far as the difficulty of this section, these pages were pretty tame. We had characters being developed, plots being set in motion. But the next one is not so easy. One section took my several days because the characters in it are so unsavory, and when it switches back to Pirate Prentice, it dives into what is (I think) another extended daydream he's looking into.

***End of Gravity's Rainbow section***

In other news, I have sent out my novel to my next readers. I was terrified to do it, but I'm excited to see what they say. I had no idea it would be so scary to send it out to people I know, but it makes sense--it's a lot easier to put the book in the hands of someone I have never met than to get feedback from people I know very well. But I think it's a strong draft. Not perfect, but strong. I think it's reached a point where I need other people to read it. I've spent so much time with it that I know it backwards and forward, and this familiarity can make me miss things.