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Perhaps the biggest reason why Gravity’s Rainbow remains so fresh and so relevant is that it is centrally informed by a deeply historicist vision that gives it a dynamic, self-updating quality, even if most contemporary readers are not much accustomed to thinking historically. In his enthusiastic appreciation of the importance of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tanner also characterized Pynchon’s novel as “one of the great historical novels of our time.” And Tanner is surely correct. Almost everything in Gravity’s Rainbow conveys some sort of implication about the shape and nature of modern Western — and even world — history. But Gravity’s Rainbow is a historical novel in a far more profound way than simply because its story is principally set in the past: it also comments on the fundamental nature of history itself. Even its most shocking and unsavory content is not there simply, or even primarily, to épater le bourgeois, though it does do that; it is there to dramatize the dark, salacious, sadomasochistic energies that, in the author’s view, have driven so much of Western history.
Moreover, not only is Gravity’s Rainbow set amidst a specific, world-changing, and vividly realized historical event (World War II and its immediate aftermath), but it also places that event in a past that is intricately connected to the present day (circa 1973) via a narrative movement that, by extension, extends into our future as well. The events that take place in 1940s Europe are most colorfully connected to the reality of the book’s initial readers in a striking final sequence wherein a German V-2 rocket, launched at the end of World War II, somehow lands on a crowded movie theater in Los Angeles (which stands in for the entirety of Nixon-era America). This connection signifies how certain fundamental issues related to power and technology were not resolved with the end of the war but instead continued in an intensified way, those V-2 rockets being merely the predecessors of the nuclear ICBMs of the Cold War era that threatened universal annihilation. The novel ends, in short, with a chilling vision of the United States’ heedless stumble towards destruction, as the audience in the theater prepares to meet its collective death with a follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong.