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Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon 9781594204234 Books

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Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon 9781594204234 Books

The new Thomas Pynchon novel is, by turns, dazzling, startling, grim, hilarious and, always, brilliant. It is also unreadable in many senses of the term. It does have a chronological plot (from the months before 9/11 to a period a few months after) and it does have themes. It has a protagonist--Maxine Tarnow--a digital-age fraud investigator; it does have what appear to be murders and it does have a villain, an entrepreneur named Gabriel Ice, who may just be a greedy monster and who may also have links with the perpetrators of 9/11. It also has a setting--Silicon Alley New York and, principally, what Pynchon terms the yup west side.

There are also many other characters, some of them memorable, but their numbers and voices are often difficult to follow. We must stop and remind ourselves who is actually speaking; then we must flip back and remind ourselves who this particular speaking character is. The novel is, basically, a slice-of-life story that concentrates on the sounds, feel, language and practices of a small historical period, but one whose reach obviously extends to the present day. The subject, as so often in Pynchon, is not so much Maxine's discrete experience of that world as the world itself, the world in which she lives and moves and tries to experience her being. That world is often a kind of dreamscape and many of her impressions of it are revealed in actual dreams. As she moves through it, Pynchon creates set pieces and songs to both reify it and undergird its evanescence. It is a world in which irony is the default position and the individual mind is marked by the incursions and affronts of omnipresent technology and the constant, sometimes reassuring eruptions of popular culture. It thus looks like and feels like your basic Pynchon novel, set in the Pynchon universe, where one is by turns racked with paranoia and relieved by slapstick humor and brilliant wit.

You read it like a (very secular) bible; the individual sections bring epiphanies and insights, but the sections do not always appear to cohere. Reading it is like undergoing one of Maxine's dreams. You see, hear and feel what this world is like, but you are immersed in it and you are denied the distance and perspective points which you would find in a traditional novel. As such, the novel risks succumbing to what Yvor Winters called the `imitative fallacy'. You should not, e.g., represent the confusions and contradictions of the world you are representing by being confusing.

Bottom line: Bleeding Edge is not as accessible as The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland or Inherent Vice. It feels like a mature Lot 49, in that the stakes are higher, the novel is about four times longer and it concerns the quest of a generally attractive female protagonist, seeking to understand the plots and connections which hover beneath a bizarre, massively-interconnected world. It is not as towering an achievement as Gravity's Rainbow. The set pieces are largely brief and, hence, not as memorable as those in other novels of Pynchon's, but many of the songs are up to his highest standards. For Pynchon devotees it is a must-read. For general readers it is a memorable, impressive example of the imaginative reach of our greatest living art novelist, a novelist continually tempted by the attractions of genre fiction.

I do not believe that you read this book for the plot, but if you wish to be anchored to a greater degree than the novel would seem to permit, there is a very helpful plot summary in Albert Rolls' review: [...]


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Bleeding Edge Thomas Pynchon 9781594204234 Books Reviews

I really enjoyed this book. I read it right after finishing Against The Day. I feel that there are very few authors today who write as well as Pynchon. He uses metaphor beautifully, which few writers today do. This book contains a few of his wonderful long wild Faulkner-Kerouac-Coltraneish sentences (check out pages 311-312 in the hardcover edition)and great place descriptions. I wonder if "DeepArcher" is not in part an allusion to Lew Archer, the (anti) hero of Ross MacDonald's wonderful series of detective novels. I think that maybe this book needs to be approached as you approach those novels- not all of the plot twists themselves are so important, rather they serve as a frame for mood, description, language and characterization. (Here I need to give a plug to "The Doomsters" and "Black Money", in my opinion MacDonald's greatest books and a must reads for anyone interested in American literature.)I disagree with those who say that Pynchon's writing has not evolved. His early work saw characters as confluences of historical forces which I feel made his work kind of "chilly", however beginning with "Vineland" he still places his characters in a historical context but there is more of a traditional sense of characterization, I think. Maxine is a fully drawn, living character. I feel that this lends more depth and warmth to his work. Finally, as one who was living in the New York City area on 9/11, I feel that I can say that Pynchon's description of that time is completely accurate and describes the tragedy of that time in a very real, non-sensationalized way.
Why do people make Thomas Pynchon out to be a difficult author to understand? Just as with Gravity's Rainbow, all that's required is a sense of humour and the ability to just relax, sit back and let him drive you through a world that's as familiar as it is strange.

With lashing of that goofy, hip humour seen running throughout Inherent Vice (and who else is breathlessly awaiting Paul Thomas Anderson's film version?), the skewed retelling of history seen in Mason Dixon, and the "don't look over your shoulder I think we're being followed" feel of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon takes off from the events surrounding 9/11 to wander the stratosphere of our collective human experience.

Bleeding Edge is provoking, funny, irreverent, and above all emphatic. And that's why it works. From nervous Jewish mothers, computer geeks, California new age savants to Russian gunsels, you find yourself relating to one of the most varied cast of characters to be found anywhere.

So don't overthink it. Just settle back and enjoy this madcap tour of one man's fin de siècle funhouse.
People who think this book is about 9/11 have totally missed the point. Though wrapped in the language and plot of conspiracies, what Bleeding Edge is really about is nostalgia -- nostalgia for childhood and lost innocence, and for neighborhoods and a world that are constantly changing, even as we move through them.

Bleeding Edge is quite up to Pynchon's best work, but it's still a wonderful read, with shadowy government operatives, narcissistic housewives, and ultra-cool hipsters and techies galore. If it tries a little too hard to capture an era with every sentence, and wanders from time to time, so what? The language is beautiful, the ideas are big and it'll probably make you think more than any 10 other novels you've read this year.

Referencing everything from the Montauk Project (an allegedly secret government program involving aliens and time-travel), to mid-eastern money laundering, Pynchon has created a world where nothing is as it seems and there's no place to hide, pretty ironic given that Pynchon himself is such a shadowy elusive figure.

One word of warning -- don't put this book down while you're in the middle of it for any length of time or you're likely to be totally lost when you pick it back up. Pynchon, as usual, demands one's full attention.
The new Thomas Pynchon novel is, by turns, dazzling, startling, grim, hilarious and, always, brilliant. It is also unreadable in many senses of the term. It does have a chronological plot (from the months before 9/11 to a period a few months after) and it does have themes. It has a protagonist--Maxine Tarnow--a digital-age fraud investigator; it does have what appear to be murders and it does have a villain, an entrepreneur named Gabriel Ice, who may just be a greedy monster and who may also have links with the perpetrators of 9/11. It also has a setting--Silicon Alley New York and, principally, what Pynchon terms the yup west side.

There are also many other characters, some of them memorable, but their numbers and voices are often difficult to follow. We must stop and remind ourselves who is actually speaking; then we must flip back and remind ourselves who this particular speaking character is. The novel is, basically, a slice-of-life story that concentrates on the sounds, feel, language and practices of a small historical period, but one whose reach obviously extends to the present day. The subject, as so often in Pynchon, is not so much Maxine's discrete experience of that world as the world itself, the world in which she lives and moves and tries to experience her being. That world is often a kind of dreamscape and many of her impressions of it are revealed in actual dreams. As she moves through it, Pynchon creates set pieces and songs to both reify it and undergird its evanescence. It is a world in which irony is the default position and the individual mind is marked by the incursions and affronts of omnipresent technology and the constant, sometimes reassuring eruptions of popular culture. It thus looks like and feels like your basic Pynchon novel, set in the Pynchon universe, where one is by turns racked with paranoia and relieved by slapstick humor and brilliant wit.

You read it like a (very secular) bible; the individual sections bring epiphanies and insights, but the sections do not always appear to cohere. Reading it is like undergoing one of Maxine's dreams. You see, hear and feel what this world is like, but you are immersed in it and you are denied the distance and perspective points which you would find in a traditional novel. As such, the novel risks succumbing to what Yvor Winters called the `imitative fallacy'. You should not, e.g., represent the confusions and contradictions of the world you are representing by being confusing.

Bottom line Bleeding Edge is not as accessible as The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland or Inherent Vice. It feels like a mature Lot 49, in that the stakes are higher, the novel is about four times longer and it concerns the quest of a generally attractive female protagonist, seeking to understand the plots and connections which hover beneath a bizarre, massively-interconnected world. It is not as towering an achievement as Gravity's Rainbow. The set pieces are largely brief and, hence, not as memorable as those in other novels of Pynchon's, but many of the songs are up to his highest standards. For Pynchon devotees it is a must-read. For general readers it is a memorable, impressive example of the imaginative reach of our greatest living art novelist, a novelist continually tempted by the attractions of genre fiction.

I do not believe that you read this book for the plot, but if you wish to be anchored to a greater degree than the novel would seem to permit, there is a very helpful plot summary in Albert Rolls' review [...]