![]() ![]() So he grapples, doing his awkward best to acknowledge the heroics of firefighters. But our narrative of that event hinges so heavily on tragedy and recovery that it’s also unsuited to Pynchon - he’s not inclined toward sentiment. It seems almost destiny that Pynchon would tackle 9/11, a moment when our nation’s most impossible paranoid fantasies came true. This is a challenge: Although Pynchon is unparalleled at creating complexity, this book, by putting 9/11 in its sights, has something universally known and obvious shining at its heart. But through it all, whether she’s carrying a gun or bickering with her best friend, everything is rolling toward 9/11. Following one embezzlement to another, she encounters hackers and computer-savvy Russian mobsters, Internet financiers, a leftist activist, a foot fetishist, visionary coders and women who aren’t what they seem. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”Ī key focus of Maxine’s investigations is DeepArcher (pronounced “departure”), a hidden Internet world like Second Life with better production values. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. It “was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. ![]() The Internet started with the Cold Warriors, Maxine’s father tells her late one night. Paranoia, conspiracy, electronic connection, government surveillance - there’s nothing like reading a Pynchon novel while new revelations about the NSA are popping up on your cellphone. It’s fitting that Pynchon is tackling the near-present, because the real world has all but overtaken his elaborate, far-out fictions. “Razorfish alumni, still the smartest people in the room” makes sense to me, as it would to anyone who knew the early Internet company and the T-shirt that declares “I Believe You Have My Stapler” requires no concordance - it’s a reference to the 1999 film “Office Space.” It all seems lighthearted to me, but future graduate students may deliberate over the importance of which kid collects Beanie Babies and which collects Pokémon. He keeps a vast amount of ephemera - and ideas, characters, vectors and subtexts - at play simultaneously, like a Vegas gambler running multiple tables at once.īecause this is my first time reading a Pynchon novel in which I know the cultural details firsthand, they carry less narrative weight. In “Bleeding Edge,” Pynchon seems like a kid playing in a ball pit, having an awful lot of fun tossing around whatever is brightly colored and within reach. “Bleeding Edge,” in particular, seems to be a data dump that’s being processed on the page.Īll of Pynchon’s works are crammed with cultural references here they seem less mysterious and significant than in previous novels. The Now books have the quality of an exploration, of digestion in progress. The Then books have a deliberateness to them, a deep dive into a specific set of ideas dappled with carefully chosen historic details. Now includes “Bleeding Edge,” “Vineland,” “The Crying of Lot 49" and the frame of “V.” The Then books are “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1944-45 seen from the vantage of 1973), “Inherent Vice” (1970 seen from 2009), “Against the Day” (circa 19) and “Mason & Dixon” (the 1760s by way of 1997). Almost divorced, she occasionally stays out all night, rides in limos with Russian mobsters and attends parties thrown by Gabriel Ice, the nasty head of a successful Silicon Alley computer security firm.Įach new Pynchon novel presents a different way to parse his bibliography, and “Bleeding Edge” makes a solid case for a divide between books set roughly in present moment and not, Now versus Then. That Maxine is the mother of two school-aged boys makes her no less eligible for dalliances with the men she meets - from a twentysomething hacker to a dangerous, near-retirement CIA-type. The error was detected after that section was printed. Thomas Pynchon: The review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Bleeding Edge,” on Page E25 of this edition erred in stating that, according to cognoscenti, the author walked his daughter to school. Protagonist Maxine Tarnow is a defrocked fraud investigator, a rule-breaking accountant who is drawn into Internet business dealings and worse by a former lover-slash-documentarian, aided by mysterious deliveries from a bike messenger who still rides under the orange jersey of, the online store than went belly-up. Few authors remain as ambitious and accomplished for so long.Įnter “Bleeding Edge,” a detective novel set in 2001 in Manhattan after the first dot-com boom-and-bust. That he is still turning out works of dizzying complexity is, frankly, astounding. It has been 50 years since Thomas Pynchon’s first book, “V.,” was published.
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