Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the great white whales of fiction, the book everybody tries to read and generally gives up on around page 158. Considered Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece, it was published in the early 70s and won the National Book Award, focusing a lot of unwelcome attention on the famously reclusive author by an audience zonked out of their skulls on LSD and weed. The novel is ranked up there with other unreadables which include James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake; Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy.

As a novelist manque in the early 70s I did my best to make it through the novel and after a few stops and starts finally did with the assistance of a compendium which helped footnote some of the more obscure references. I’m glad I made it through the book, and to this day, if a password reminder asks me the question: “Who is the person you’d most like to meet?” It always come down to Pynchon. Why? To ask him what the hell the deal was with Byron the Bulb.

Anyway, in a discussion with a colleague this morning on writing,I recounted how a professor of mine held up the following excerpt from Gravity’s Rainbow as a masterpiece of list writing. To set the stage, it’s World War II in London. The protagonist, Lieut. Tyrone Slothrop, has been brought home by a girlfriend to meet her mother, Mrs. Quoad, for afternoon tea. Candy is offered. Slothrop takes a piece that looks like a WW I hand grenade:

“Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. “Poisoned…” he is able to croak.

“Show a little backbone,” advises Mrs. Quoad.

“Yes,” Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, “don’t you know there’s a war on? Here now love, open your mouth.”

Through the tears he can’t see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going “Yum, yum, yum,” and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like: gin. “Wha’s ‘is,” he inquires thickly.

“A gin marshmallow,” sez Mrs. Quoad.

“Awww…”

“Oh that’s nothing, have one of these—” his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it’s tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.

“More tea?” Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.

“Nasty cough,” Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. “Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can.”

The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.”

That remains one of my favorite comic passages ever.

JP Donleavy — The Ginger Man

The other evening I went to an afterwork cocktail party and light dinner with a couple dozen colleagues at a local pub called “The Ginger Man.” I’ve strolled past the place countless times, but had written it off as just another bad Irish pub in a neighborhood thick with them.

The Ginger Man, now there’s a novel to remember. It was so inappropriate when it was published in the mid 1950s that it was judged too obscene to publish in the UK and US and had to be printed by some Parisian porno press. It was the debut of James Patrick Donleavy, an American-Irish novelist born in New York City and educated at Trinity College in Dublin, and is the tale of a scurrilous American law student who lives a deplorable life of chasing women and punishing his liver while his pregnant wife frets at home. It is not a novel any man’s wife is going to suggest to her book club, and Oprah isn’t going to get gushy about it. Ever.

Donleavy was a remarkably funny, and very talented writer. One of his later works, Schultz, is one of the funniest things I’ve read — recommended to me by my Falstaffian step-brother Joe Nickerson and his British rugby buddy, (and my proctologist) Mark Bazalgette (whose ancestor, Sir Joseph Bazalgette: invented London’s sewer) — as part of a “bad-men doing unspeakable acts” series of literary works which includes the wonderful Money by Martin Amis. Basically tales of crapulous debauchery involving pornography, alcohol, bad hygiene, and inadvertent acts of public vandalism. I would include Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in this canon of party-hearty fiction, but The Ginger Man came first.

I walked into the bar and saw no evidence of JP Donleavy. The chalkboard behind the back bar seemed to honor some deceased customer, but not Donleavy, who passed away last month at the age of 91.

I ordered an Irish whiskey from the waiter but he claimed to have none. Detesting Guinness I looked at the list of expensive single malt scotches, asked the waiter if he was taking names and attendance, and assured of anonymity on the tab,  ordered a peaty Talisker neat. Ate a “slider”, slapped some backs, “rang the bell” making sure those who needed to note my presence took notice, and then pulled a sober Irish-goodbye to make the next train to Providence.