Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

Somewhere over wartime London a V-2 rocket is already falling, faster than its own sound, so the scream arrives after the blast and the dead never hear the thing that kills them. Pynchon takes that arc, up and over and down, as the shape of everything in _Gravity's Rainbow_: a vast descent through the bombed-out Zone of a collapsing Germany, where an American lieutenant named Slothrop is hunted because his body somehow knows where the rockets will fall before they do. He goes looking for the reason and finds instead the cartels who fuelled both armies, who never cared which flag won, who were only ever building the next rocket. The book is paranoid the way a mystic is devout, certain that everything connects, and never once wrong. It is filthy, hilarious, grief-stricken, and stuffed with more equations and dirty songs than a novel should be able to hold. By the last pages Slothrop has come apart into rumour, and only the arc remains, perfect and indifferent, still pointing down at all of us.