Bleeding Edge Hardcover – September 17, 2013

[...]Sorting Things Out (On Pynchon's Bleeding Edge)September 14, 2013It's here. Nine months after an Internet rumor that gestated into details ever more elusive and a glimpse of the first couple of paragraphs, Penguin Press has delivered Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, a historical romance about 9/11, the dot com bust, and New York City. Four hundred and seventy-seven pages spanning the period from March, 2001, to February, 2002, it's a Pynchon novel about a time and place most of his readers will have lived through. Yet, the events seem as far away as Malta in 1919 or Peenemunde in the 1940's. That's what Pynchon does best: show us how our memories are made to cast shadows on the fleeting and evanescent present.And Bleeding Edge is almost certainly about the present, the here and now. Pynchon's use of the present tense throughout the novel, except for the frequent flashbacks, is reminiscent of the opening of Gravity's Rainbow--hallucinatory and ominous. The present tense turns some parts into one of those interactive text-based games from the late 1970's--unadorned and urgent. Other parts of the book read like a film treatment, a gentle nudge to some bold director. If Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014) is half as popular as I expect, filmmakers take notice of Bleeding Edge. Let me suggest Mary Herron for the job. Maxine Tarnow (nee Loeffler and to be portrayed, IMHO, by Catherine Keener), Pynchon's fraud investigating heroine off the licensure grid, is as interesting as Betty Paige or Valerie Solanas and could take on Patrick Bateman, a prototypical yuppie similar to the ones encountered in Bleeding Edge, although with more homicidal tendencies.But the present tense is not just a gimmick. Although set twelve years ago, the narrative is about the unfolding of 9/11, a portal into a new world as uncertain as the many links and urls that Maxine follows in her quest within the Deep Web. Pynchon describes the Web as the eternal present, time flattened, measured, if at all, by clicks. After 9/11, Heidi, Maxine's Rhoda, says that everyone has been infantilized, and Maxine feels the regressive force of that tragedy on a New York City street, where she feels in a time warp. Maxine finds comfort in recognizing her surroundings as what had to be "the present" and "the normal." The present of the Bleeding Edge may be shell shock or the desire to set to zero the delta-t's Pynchon wrote earnestly about once.Quests for Pynchon have always been about sorting things out. Maxine searches for answers both before and after 9/11. The tease is whether the quest changes with the attacks. For those who poo-poo conspiracies and paranoia, the fall of the towers may have been a wake-up call. Or it may have been a random event not connected to broader plots or schemes. We are reminded early on about another 9/11, in Chile, 1973, when the CIA assassinated Allende. While the connectedness of all history into plot is presented in bold operatic style in Gravity's Rainbow, the tensions are given a more human scale in Bleeding Edge. How to make sense of things? Does the explanation for the Event explain everything? Or is it just one of the many mysteries, mundane and quotidian?Maxwell's Demon is a metaphor that appears in The Crying of Lot 49 explicitly, but also pervades all of Pynchon's work. Imagine a box filled with particles of gas moving at different speeds. Partition the box and place a trap door on the partition. Maxwell's Demon stands guard at the door, letting particles of certain speed go through while slower particles stay behind. Eventually the particles are sorted out into high speed, high temperature ones and low speed, low temperature ones. The entropy in the box has decreased without any work on the part of the Demon except for the mental work of sorting. Magically, the Demon defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by allowing less disorder with no expenditure of energy.Sorting things out is what folks in Pynchon novels do whether it is Oedipa uncovering the layers of America long hidden, Mason & Dixon drawing their line, Prairie Wheeler figuring out the Sixties, the Webb Children negotiating different vectors of capitalism, Doc discovering where all the sex, drugs and rock& roll went. Bleeding Edge is no different. We follow Maxine, a forensic accountant, as she examines balance sheets, web sites, financial records, in order to detect fraud and thereby find the truth. Conspiracies permeate the novel both before and after the Event, and when it occurs, it is depicted quietly but powerfully. Bleeding edge technology is one that is so untried and untested that no one knows where it might take us. Characters in Pynchon's historic romance walk the bleeding edge to an uncertain and perhaps unreachable future. They are, like the readers who take them in and define them, caught in a present sorting out the enveloping experiences.All of which might suggest that the book has no resolutions and leaves the reader hanging. That would be a mistake. At least this reader found the process of sorting things out envigorating and moving. As readers we are not trapped in an eternal present, and Maxine and her host of comrades are moving inexorably to where we are now.The novel begins and ends with the maternal act of tending after children. But Maxine's maternalism shifts through the novel. The conclusion is not so much about children flying the nest as about parents' guarding at a distance. One thinks about the mantra "Keep cool, but care" from V. In Bleeding Edge, that shibboleth might be "Keep distant, but help," a lesson somewhat more affirmative, more active than the earlier renunciation. Towards the end of the novel, Maxine expresses her concerns about her sons to her father: "I don't want to see them turn into their classmates, cynical smart-mouthed little bastards--but what if Ziggy and Otis start caring too much, Pop, this world, it could destroy them so easily." And as she wondered, I thought back to an earlier scene in which Maxine watches the firefighters clean up the rubble at "Ground Zero" and wonder what drives them to work as selflessly as they do. Is it possible for someone to care too much?The novel begins with a great joke at Pynchon's expense. He describes the philosophy of a fictional Otto Kugelblitz, an errant student of Freud. Kugelblitz posits four stages for human development: the solipsism of youth, the sexual hysteria of adolescence and young adulthood, the paranoia of middle life, and the dementia of late life. These four stages culminate in death, the only form of sanity. Is Pynchon mapping his own trajectory? The truth is Pynchon in his novels seems to go through all four stages at the same time: the solipsism of the narrative voice, the erotic fetishes and urges of his characters, the ever-present and overplayed paranoia, and the demented propensities for bad puns and critical jabs. Singling up the four stages is the search for meaning and the realization that the mental quest pales before actual human contact, emotion, and connection.Gravity's Rainbow ended in fragments as the grand paranoid schemes gave way to counterforces. The five novels after Gravity's Rainbow present different responses to the ubiquitous and oppressive System: family in Vineland, work and engagement in Mason & Dixon, social participation in Against the Day, clarity of purpose in Inherent Vice, and now simple, pure love and caring in Bleeding Edge. We have the joy to see how Pynchon tries to sort things out through the various worlds that he lovingly and carefully projects for us. Polymath as Pynchon is called, there is no pretense to have all or any answers, but his imagination has shown us possibilities that transcend labels like post-modern, or realist, or minimalist, or even historical romance.`Now, everybody--'.

Update 5/19/14---By way of a preface: I recently came across a quote from the German poet Heinrich Heine, which struck me as apt to Bleeding Edge because of the concerns of some reviewers that Pynchon's later books seem to them to represent a falling off of his ability. The Heine quote comes from a fragmentary set of essays/memoirs called "Florentine Nights," which uses a framing story of visits to an invalid who is having trouble getting the sleep she needs. The narrator (more or less Heine himself) keeps her amused with the latest gossip of the places he has been and with his opinions about famous people he has met. In the quotation, he is talking about Rossini, who stopped writing operas early on in his long life (though he did continue to write piano pieces occasionally that he eventually published under the title "Sins of My Old Age"). Anyway, I think it throws an interesting light on what Pynchon is up to these days."An artist who has only talent feels to the end of his life the impulse to work it out; he is goaded by ambition; he feels that life is always short of perfection, and he is impelled to attain to the highest. But genius has already given us his highest possible work; he is content; he scorns the world and petty ambition, and goes home as Shakespeare did, or promenades, smiling and jesting, on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, like Joachim Rossini." (translation by Charles Godfrey Leland)###I found Bleeding Edge remarkable at first reading for a number of reasons. It catches what it's like to live in New York City---not so much in a realistic as in a somewhat exaggerated satirical way. The way people talk and act in the book is perhaps an idealized version, that is, how New Yorkers like to think of themselves, so it may appeal to us more than it apparently does to some who live elsewhere. But it isn't a false picture, and I don't believe that it is the result of Pynchon's trying to impress anyone or be clever. (Anyway, what is this animus against cleverness that you notice in a number of reviews?) Have you had the experience of getting to be friends with people, then when you first visit their home discovering that they have many of the same books on their shelves as you do? I think most New Yorkers will have something like that experience of an overlap of their own knowledge with what Pynchon knows about his city.The book also represents a very interesting development in Pynchon's style. Jonathan Lethem in his warmly positive review, in the New York Times Book Review, noticed the youthfulness of the narrative and made the claim (mistaken, in my opinion) that except for the historical detail, this could have been written by Pynchon forty years ago. This did allow him to indulge a lovely conceit to end his review, that Pynchon is a very promising young author. I think, however, that Lethem was wrong to say that the book resists having a "late style"; it is an atypical late style, certainly, but the density and the ease of the performance strikes me as something no one could achieve without decades of experience of both writing and living. I was reminded of seeing Sonny Rollins a few years ago (I think he was in his late seventies at the time) take a solo of twenty or thirty choruses. It seems that it is possible for some artists to lose all resistance to creativity when they reach this point.A number of the thoughtful reviews here compare the book to earlier books by Pynchon. With all due respect, I noted that there seems to be little agreement as to which of the earlier books Bleeding Edge is supposed to be better or worse than. What this says to me is that trying to place this book in relation to the others may be even more beside the point than it is with most authors. There are certain mannerisms that you find in all Thomas Pynchon's books (a love of lists, silly songs, cutesy names and spelling---"sez," for example; more positively, his musical images are never embarrassing to a musician, unlike those of many word people).But one of the things that make Pynchon stand out is how different each book is from all the others, in part because he often writes *as if* in a genre. While he will devote varying levels of energy to the maintenance of a genre, it appears that some readers are misled, for the complaints about this book and Pynchon's writing in general often stem from readers bringing expectations to the books that are not satisfied. Bleeding Edge is not a detective novel any more than Mason & Dixon is a historical novel. Other complaints are based on what I believe is a mistaken idea of why you read a novel at all. As my reference to Sonny Rollins implied, Pynchon's writing can be thought of as a kind of verbal jazz. (You don't listen to Rollins to be philosophically challenged or to become more knowledgable or more wise, do you?) In the course of reading, you might learn a lot, you might be led to think deeply; but that is not why you do it.I sincerely regret having to spell it out so baldly, but it seems that quite a few readers just don't get this: If you demand that a book end with the plot tied up neatly, you are bound to be disappointed, because one of Pynchon's themes is that this is impossible; it is a corollary of his theme that you can't know anything for sure. In Bleeding Edge, a governing image is the computer game DeepArcher (a kind of weird Second Life), in which it is impossible to retrace your steps---like life, right? but also, more frighteningly, like our contemporary mediated consciousness, which looks more and more like universal amnesia. Pynchon's books are also like life in that they never have neat endings (the plots often dissolve), but they all have *satisfying* endings.As to whether this is a "9/11 novel," you shouldn't dismiss the idea because the destruction of the World Trade Center plays a relatively minor role in the story. If you don't live in NYC, you may have a media-distorted sense of how the tragedy felt in the City. I think the book captures how quickly the whole thing retreated into the background---not forgotten, and with many lingering effects, but not present in a way that was so susceptible to manipulation outside the City. (Giuliani may have been "America's mayor," but you won't find too many people in the City who would like to see him come back.) New York and New Yorkers absorb major disruptions (the way some skyscrapers have absorbed the impact of an airplane), and the book gets this exactly right.All of the foregoing is quite superficial. But a book like Bleeding Edge needs more time than we are perhaps used to allowing for to have its full impact. Without any desire to make comparisons, I would point out that you can find people writing on Amazon that they just don't get Jane Austen or Henry James; that Joyce or Shakespeare are overrated (Joyce perhaps thought Shakespeare was overrated; Shaw certainly did); reading Mark Twain's autobiography, I discover that he found Middlemarch boring and Sherlock Holmes sheer claptrap. So don't be put off by the naysayers. They may have a right to their opinions, but you might find you disagree if you give yourself the chance.Pynchon is not a spoon-feeder. You need to stay awake and make connections yourself, which is what he clearly does. If you're like that, you will find him great company.

As I scratch beneath the surface of the novels of Thomas Pynchon – a paltry three out of the man’s eight in total (over nearly six decades!) – I can only stand back in amazement at the level of ambition this writer exudes. This 2013 work astonishes not only in the mastery in the prose and the (characteristic) complexity of plot (with 29 major characters listed on Wiki!), but, as Maxine Tarnow’s fraud investigator tries to unravel a whole series of potential 'conspiracy theories’, involving mysterious billionaire, Gabriel Ice, in the wake of (and perhaps underlying) the traumatic events of 9/11, Pynchon, a man at the time well into his eighth decade on the planet, shows a remarkable (some might day unnatural!) penchant for delving into all things technophile, plumbing the depths of the 'deep web’ and virtual reality with seeming alacrity.Having myself just emerged from the wonderful (oft hilarious) 'hippy-haze’ world of Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, Pynchon again peppers Bleeding Edge with many (if slightly more sporadic) moments of great hilarity – Maxine’s pole-dancing visit to the sleazy, wonderfully-named nightclub, the Joie de Beavre, being a case in point. An example of another memorable recurring motif here is the string of TV dramatisations of 'famous people doing famous people’ (the final one here being Leonardo DiCaprio in The Fatty Arbuckle Story) that Maxine and family are witness to. At the more serious end, Pynchon blends (parodic?) themes of potential Jewish, Russian, Arab, etc. involvement in the novel’s terrorist-capitalist sense of paranoia and, as one set of blurb suggests, making the reader ‘giddy’ in the process. Whilst these 'plot themes’ might just wash over this reader a little, the novel does engage at the human level, both on Maxine’s life trajectory of reuniting with her estranged husband, Horst, and as a respectful and subtle tribute to a nation’s response to great tragedy. Gravity’s Rainbow, here I come!

... little is known about Thomas since he legged it in Mexico all these years ago but we know he was born 8th May 1937 and Bleeding Edge was published in 2013 so this is the work of a man in his late seventies!! and reads like a hip novel by a 35-year old ...When the Olympix of Hip are finally in place he is going to have to be awarded a whole series of backdated gold is Thomas ..What do we find here? A novel about The Internet and 9-11... well these are current themes in Western Consciousness... He seriously questions the official versh but never says anything definite ... who indeed could?On the Internet he is definitely a fan it seems ... who indeed could not be?The novel has all the quasi Talmudic/Rabbinic erudition of earlier long works but maybe not the zip and Chi; but we did say late seventies so fair dues; personally I wanted to see what he had done here but would rather re-read the older long pieces which always veer back to Namibia 1905 the sound of the sjambok the shady allure of Südwest ...Ha the old days ...Should you read this book? ...der! It's Pynchon; which means almost always better than most crimes committed to keyboard anywhere in the known universe ... Now where is this sjambok ?

For years, I've kept spare copies of The Crying of Lot 49 in a box to be pressed into the hands of anyone who hasn't read it. If anything, Bleeding Edge is the world of Oedipa Maas forty years on, admittedly on the other side of America. The energy, the savagery and the droll takes on the world of New York between the dot com boom and the financial collapse (with 9/11 in between) make this the definitive version of that era. Yes, there are chronological tricks played with the wicked benefit of hindsight, but such is Pynchon's intellectual power that one can almost imagine that he had predicted everything. This novel is immensely approachable, and those who have been dissuaded in the past by Pynchon's learning (and joy in displaying it) could find themselves surprised. Many lesser writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize - and I'd relish Pynchon not turning up to receive that award were the Swedes to give him his due.

I really liked this one and I've read everything by Pynchon. There's approximately a laugh a paragraph. And often enough it's quality laughing.Typical Pynchon there's a million characters, or so, but you can already download an app where you can look them up, plus it lets you in on other obscure references.You will really enjoy this book, and if you were working in IT during the dotcom era, then it's a must buy. Just do it. His research is great - old guy like him can't know that much about IT surely? Think again.He has that signature plot magic where unexplained stuff just happens, which I feel is dated. Writers now tend to do magic with very clever plotting - not magic couriers. But that would be my only beef. Otherwise - an excellent read - and well done Thomas for pulling this rabbit out of your hat so late in your career. The best, I think, since GR.It's a BUY.

This book lacks the depth and complexity that I love about Pynchon's longer works like Against the Day or Gravity's Rainbow, but it's still amazing. In fact, that might make it good for people new to Pynchon. As someone born in the 90s this story, set in the 00s, really captures and conveys the excitement, fear, confusion, anxiety, and optimism of that era.