Gravity's Rainbow (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem.  Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then  (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of  death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title,Gravity's Rainbow, refers to  the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to  symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big  trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky.Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the  mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on  the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in  rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its  presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming  V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany.That's just the Imipolex G tip of the shrieking vehicle that is  Pynchon's book. It's pretty much impossible to follow a standard plot; one must  have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow  up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns  only just past our comprehension. You will enjoy Pynchon's cartoon inferno  far more if you consult Steven Weisenburger's briefcompanionto the novel,  which sorts out Pynchon's blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes. Rest easy: there really is a simple  reason why Kekulé von Stradonitz's dream about a serpent biting its  tail (which solved the structure of the benzene molecule) belongs in the same novel  as the comic-book-hero Plastic Man.Pynchon doesn't want you to rest easy with solved mysteries, though.Gravity's Rainbowuses beautiful prose to induce an altered  state of consciousness, a buzz. It's a trip, and it will last.--Tim  Appelo