This reputation does an obvious disservice to the book itself, and to a potential audience of curious readers. And for all of Rainbow’s dismal prognostications about our corporatized, death-obsessed future (er … present), for all its chronicling of the foreclosure of the frontier of human possibility, Pynchon serves up countless images and ideas that baffle and inspire: a village ruled by a roving pack of dogs, a sentient light bulb on a revolutionary crusade against the Man, a mind-boggling sequence in which the novel’s characters appear to bust through the fourth wall and invade the real world of the reader. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission