(“Remember the week before this happened, all those put options on United and American Airlines? Which turned out to be exactly the two airlines that got hijacked?”) If you were sitting in a plane next to someone muttering about such things, you might ask to change seats, but Pynchon has long managed to blend his particularly bleak view of latter-day humankind with a tolerant ability to find true humor in our foibles. government, with the implication, as Horst later will ponder, that all are bound up in the collapse of the Twin Towers. One track she follows leads to a genius billionaire and electronic concoctions that can scarcely be believed-but also, in a customarily loopy way, to organized crime, terrorism, big data and the U.S. Her estranged husband, apparently a decent enough sort, “to this day has enjoyed a nearly error-free history of knowing how certain commodities around the world will behave,” but Maxine has a keen sense of how data flows and from whom to whom.
PYNCHON BLEEDING EDGE CODE
Maxine Tarnow is, on the face of it, just another working mom in the city, but in reality, after she’s packed her kids’ lunches and delivered them at school, she’s ferreting around with data cowboys and code monkeys, looking into various sorts of electronic fraud. Paranoia, that operative word in Pynchon’s world ever since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), is what one of his characters here calls “the garlic in life’s kitchen.” Well, there’s paranoia aplenty to be had in Pynchon’s sauté pan, served up in the dark era of the 9/11 attack, the dot-com meltdown and the Patriot Act. Who else does that?ĭavid Kipen is the former director of reading initiatives at the National Endowment for the Arts and is the founder of Libros Schmibros, a nonprofit lending library and used bookstore in Los Angeles.Pynchon ( Inherent Vice, 2009, etc.) makes a much-anticipated return, and it’s trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes.
PYNCHON BLEEDING EDGE PLUS
All this, plus a stripjoint called Joie de Beavre and a West Indian proctologist named Pokemon. On the contrary, Bleeding Edge is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces. But in its world-historical savvy, its supple feel for the joys and stings of love-both married and parental-this new book is anything but minor. Bleeding Edge is mellow, plummy, minor-key Pynchon, his second such in a row since Against the Day (2006)-that still-smoking asteroid, whose otherworldly inner music readers are just beginning to tap back at. It's a peculiarity of musical notation that major works are, more often than not, set in a minor key, and vice versa. No one, but no one, rivals Pynchon's range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency. Luckily, Pynchon and Austen have ample recourse to the oldest, hardest-to-invoke rule in the book -when in doubt, be a genius. Each page has a little more of it than the one before, but you never quite get to the clincher. Still, reading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex. Shoals of red herrings keep swimming by, many of them never seen again. The plot's dizzying profusion of murder suspects plays like something out of early Raymond Chandler, under whose bright star Bleeding Edge unmistakably unreels. Maxi soon becomes embroiled in the mysterious case of one Lester Traipse, a superannuated Silicon Alley veteran who, along with the dotcom bubble, has just gotten popped. Our heroine throughout is Maxine Tarnow, a defrocked fraud investigator and daftly doting Manhattan mom, still stuck in that early, "my husband.ex-husband" stage of an unwanted divorce. Of course, the year 2001 means something besides HAL and Dave now, and Pynchon spirits us through "that terrible morning" in September-and its "infantilizing" aftermath-with unhysterical grace. Where Vineland slyly set a story of Orwellian government surveillance in 1984, Bleeding Edge situates a fable of increasingly sentient computers in, naturally, 2001. Like Ornette Coleman's riff on The Rite of Spring, it starts out strong, misplaces the melody amid some delightfully surreal noodling, and finally swans away in sweet, lingering diminuendo.Īlmost all Pynchon's books are historical novels, with this one no exception. Now comes Bleeding Edge, a lovably scruffy comedy of remarriage, half-hidden behind the lopsided Groucho mask of Pynchon's second straight private-eye story. Much as that book yoyo-ed between an international femme fatale and a feckless contemporary klutz, the Pynchon shelf has alternated between globe-trotting, century-spanning bricks like Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and impish, only slightly historical, California-set bagatelles like Inherent Vice (2009). wasn't just the best first novel ever, it was a blueprint for his entire career.
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