See, the nice thing about reading Gravity's Rainbow (I'm in The Counterforce, within 140 pages of the end of it all) is that after six-hundred-plus pages of Pynchon, McMurtry gives you so much more in so fewer pages that you can knock it out in a few hours and squeeze out some genuine tears at the end, to boot.

TLPS characters not only feel desolate, but the novel's omniscient narrator evokes desolation at every turn: Coach Popper's treatment of Joe Bob, the night the boys take Billy out, every naked swimming party, usw.

Strangely enough, though, in many ways, GR and TLPS features film as its primary medium (yeah, I know they're both books, but the picture show is a rite of passage that unites its characters, and GR is a movie, so sayeth my husband, the brilliant Future Doctor Monstro, and from what I've read, I believe it — that's the ONLY way it makes sense, and of course it's supposed to make sense — even Finnegans Wake is supposed to make sense at some level, but I won't be able to tell you that for certain 'til December.