Gravity's Rainbow
1973
Postmodern fiction
Set in the final months of World War II and its aftermath, the novel follows Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose erections seem to predict where German V-2 rockets will fall. From this premise Pynchon builds an enormous, digressive, hallucinatory work spanning dozens of characters and storylines, touching on paranoia, entropy, corporate power, and the death drive. Winner of the National Book Award and a byword for ambitious, difficult fiction.