“I do worry, though, that Gravity’s Rainbow may be turning into an undervisited monument. In a poll of sixteen assistants and assistant editors under the age of thirty at my publishing company, a marvelously well-read group, I discovered that only two of them had read the book and only five had read any books at all by Pynchon. The comments from those who had read Pynchon suggested that they found him slow going stylistically and that his concerns were in general alien and irrelevant to them. This makes sense. Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them, whereas these young people came of age after the fall of communism, in a time when technology is viewed as the royal road to imaginative and personal freedom. In a very real sense, then, Gravity’s Rainbow is turning historicalan inevitable fate. Three decades on, it has acquired something of the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin ascribed to works of art produced before the advent of mechanical reproduction. The question that remains is whether the book will come to seem dated in the years to come, or if it will pass the Poundian test of being news that stays news. Who can tell? What I do know about Gravity’s Rainbow for absolute certain is this: There is nothing to compare to it now.” (BookForum)