Picture me this

THOMAS PYNCHON’S 1973 novel, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is still so frenetic, paranoid, preternaturally sharp, abrupt in its changes of subject and tone and relentless in its probing of the sinister connections among sex, high-tech polymers and the Blitz that a person would have to be slightly off to think he understands it enough to illustrate it.

Yet Zak Smith, with uninhibited bravado and exactly the right kind of insanity, has done something remarkable in “Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated”: created a series of images that approach the richness of their source. He draws a lurid and intoxicating netherworld, complete in its own right and, at the same time, an illuminating companion to the novel. Since all editions of “Gravity’s Rainbow” seem to be printed from the same plates, each one of Smith’s illustrations will correspond to one page of the foxed copy you’ve been trucking around since college.

Smith’s illustrations reflect the many moods of Pynchon’s novel. Most are black and white, some are in color; some are polished, others have a jagged, restless line; some are spare drawings, others are almost photorealistic, their edges blurred as if wet. Some images bow to contemporary graphic novelists, like Daniel Clowes; some (the map detailing Slothrop’s romantic escapades, which eerily predict the locations of future bombings; the banana breakfast; Grigori the sentient octopus) are representational, while others approach abstraction. As we might expect from the artist who has brought us such series of images as “Girls in the Naked Girl Business” and “Drawings From Around the Time I Became a Porn Star,” there’s plenty of sex -- a veritable romp of it, just as in the novel. And though Smith’s drawings feel as contemporary and postmodern as “Gravity’s Rainbow” still does, he also ably evokes a sense of the novel’s historical mood (“the twelve spokes of a stranded artillery piece,” World War II bomber jets, zeppelins, ladies in “stylish gold wedgies”) and of the pervasive aura of threat in wartime, visible in Smith’s rendering of one very scary kitten.

If you’ve forgotten, since your last reading, your glee at the aerial vaudeville custard pie battle or Slothrop eating Mrs. Quoad’s disgusting wine jellies, Smith’s drawings will remind you; he’ll also illustrate the molecular structure of the superplastic Imipolex G, if you’ve ever wondered; and in a haunting series of images, he evokes Pokler’s despair at the fact that his daughter visits from a concentration camp at such wide intervals that he is uncertain the child is his own.

Though I wish Smith had depicted the novel’s opening line (“A screaming comes across the sky”), he does such a fine job with flagstones “slippery with mist” and “the kind of sunset you hardly ever see anymore, a 19th-century wilderness sunset” that it’s easy to forgive him. His author’s foreword is full of silly posturing, but “Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated” is a prodigious work, a feast for the eyes and the intellect, and a fitting homage to one of the greatest novels of our times. *