Volume 20, Number 4 · March 22, 1973
Rocketing to the Apocalypse
By Michael Wood
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Viking, 760 pp., $4.95 (paper)
In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), an unlikely Jacobean tragedy is staged by a group of California players and described in the jocular manner of S. J. Perelman revisiting an old movie ('Evil Duke Angelo, meanwhile, is scheming to amalgamate the duchies of Squamuglia and Faggio, by marrying off the only royal female available, his sister Francesca, to Pasquale, the Faggian usurper…'). When the evil Duke orders the execution of the hero, 'a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words' of the play.
Review, 2336 words
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