gravity's rainbow

Elevator operation on Thanksgiving Day is a total bore. I was bored last night, but someone from the eleventh floor gave me a plate of turkey and stuffing and yams and cranberry sauce, so it wasn’t all bad.
Boredom, and the ability to deal with it constructively, is a big part of the elevator operator’s trade. I sit for 8 hours, near the elevator. When the elevator rings, I drive it up and collect whoever rang the bell. when someone comes in, I help them with their load, if necessary, and drive them up. On a typical working day, I give about 50 elevator rides. Over 8 hours, it works out to one every 7 or eight minutes, but there are rush times, so I can sit idle for as long as an hour sometimes, and then stand in the elevator for ten minutes going up and down and up and down.
But on days like Thanksgiving, all the guests arrive at the time specified, and they all stay up there for hours and hours while we go crazy in the lobby from boredom. The doorman listens to the radio, and I try to read.
` Gravity’s Rainbow is a big important novel by Thomas Pynchon, and I’ve been banging my head against it for weeks now. It’s almost turned me off to reading completely.
It is set in Europe during the last part of World War Two and it’s immediate aftermath. The central characters work in Psy-Ops, and the V-2 rocket looms throughout. There’s lots of weird sex and decadence, and everyone’s paranoid. Slothrop, the American character who the plot mostly follows, was in London for the Blitz, and afterward wanders through Europe looking for some chemical compound critical to the construction of the rocket. Drinking and drugging his way through Paris and Berlin, he meets crazy characters along the way, which unfolds with Pynchon’s perversely playful prose. I worked on it last night, but it’s slow going. It stopped being fun on about page 588. I really just want to see what happens and be done with it, but you have to read the whole thing to know that, thus my frustration.