Present in every scene, Maxine is a single mom and a quasi PI—in Pynchon’s words, a ‘Certified Fraud Examiner gone rogue.’ A case involving certain shadowy transactions leads her into Matrix territory, first to a virtual world known as DeepArcher, a sort of Second Life avant la lettre, then to the Deep Web, the ‘endless junkyard’ of the Internet, beyond the reach of search engines, and toward a ‘horizon between coded and codeless,’ where even the dead might live again. But it’s the living, breathing details of Upper West Side life, circa 2001, that give Bleeding Edge its humor and its heart … After the towers fall, and after immersion in DeepArcher, even the real world feels less real. Pynchon slips a note of unease into his droll description of that first post-9/11 Halloween, when ‘not even people who said, ‘Oh, I’m just going as myself’ were authentic replicas of themselves.’
It’s tempting to suppose that Bleeding Edge has been written, in part, as a response to the Pynchonization of consensus reality, a transformation that became irrefutable with the rise of the World Wide Web, with its name like that of a global crime syndicate out of some half-parodic James Coburn spy caper and its infinite interlinks a perfect metaphor for paranoia itself. Having nuzzled up to the subject briefly in Inherent Vice, Pynchon digs deep, here, into the history of the WWW (V. sextupled?), from the DARPAnet Cretaceous of 1969 to the dot-com bust at the turn of the millennium … A good postmodernist, like a 9/11 truther, can afford the luxury of disdain for innocence; a parent is bound to protect it. Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.
Are you ready for Thomas (Screaming Comes Across the Sky) Pynchon on the subject of Sept. 11, 2001? On the one hand, his poetry of paranoia and his grasp of history’s surrealist passages make a perfect fit. Yet his slippery insouciance, his relentless japery, risk being tonally at odds with the subject … Bleeding Edge unnervingly plays footsie with 9/11 trutherism, but I think the discomfort this arouses is intentional. Like DeLillo in Libra, Pynchon is interested in the mystery of wide and abiding complicity, not some abruptly punctured innocence … In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment — railway and post, the Internet, etc. — perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance. The rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live.
Mr. Pynchon tackles Sept. 11 head-on. And he also addresses the other great contemporary subject — the Internet and its transformation of our world — that happens to mesh so completely with his enduring fascination with hidden connections, alternate realities and the plight of people caught up in the gears of a ravenous and gargantuan techno-political machine. The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details … Mr. Pynchon’s people have always verged on the cartoonish, but those in Bleeding Edge are especially poor specimens, neither resonant nor satiric in any memorable way.
In his futuristic (recent) present, at a time when New Yorkers are still recovering from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, anyone who has access to a computer screen and knows where to look can find refuge from the post-tech-boom doldrums in a parallel digital universe called ‘DeepArcher’ (get it?), and secede from ‘meatspace’ reality…with or without doing what we once thought of as dying … The future that he so precociously, disturbingly foresaw long ago now surges around us. With Bleeding Edge, he shows that he has mastered the move from the shock of the new to the shock of the now, while cushioning the blow. If Maxi, in the post-9/11 world, keeps finding it ‘harder to tell ‘real’ NYC from translations’ and ‘keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world,’ she is not alone. Pynchon throws her, and us, a rope.
...a genre-drunk, ganja-fried study of place and paranoid mood, with a certain ceiling on its explorations of character, a lovely unconcern for those snoots who find its meta-pop sensibilities lacking, and down the home stretch a laggardly quality as the narrative threads of its shaggy-dog subplots get matted. But it strikes me as a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day … His view of the tech world is captivating. Though he doesn’t attempt any grand-scale Balzacian social analysis of Silicon Alley, he gives the full Fitzgerald swoon to passages describing the ritual sacrifice of innocence on the altar of IPO ambition and also to a dot-com party that unfolds on Saturday, Sept. 8.
When Bleeding Edge begins, on ‘the first day of spring 2001,’ the dot-com bubble has burst, and the start-ups of Silicon Alley, that ‘enchanted country between the Flatiron Building and the East Village,’ have defaulted on their leases. Maxine Tarnow—Jewish, sardonic, single mother of two boys—is a professional fraud investigator … Though accessible through the Internet, DeepArcher links to no other Web site and is hidden from Google; it’s a closed system. It is, in other words, much like a Pynchon novel—shapeless, chaotic, open to interpretation, equally capable of producing boredom and wonder, bewilderment and enlightenment … Technology is paradise; technology is hell. Pynchon embraces both interpretations.
Bleeding Edge is set in New York City, and the looming shadow of 9/11 touches every page. Nonetheless, many of those pages are outrageously funny, others are sexy, touchingly domestic, satirical or deeply mysterious. All are brilliantly written in Pynchon’s characteristically revved-up, even slightly over-revved style — a joy to read, though the techno-babble of various computer geeks can take SOME getting used to. Still, as spring passes into summer and summer approaches fall, our anxiety grows and intensifies … Bleeding Edge swarms with amazing characters, many of them verging on caricature, although convincing enough on the page … There are, in fact, jokes and puns and put-downs on nearly every page of Bleeding Edge — the conversations between Maxine and her lifelong friend Heidi are particularly catty, affectionate and vulgar. But laughter can’t stave off the book’s encroaching darkness.
Bleeding Edge chronicles the birth of the now — our terrorism-obsessed, NSA-everywhere, smartphone Panopticon zeitgeist — in the crash of the towers. It connects the dots, the packets, the pixels. We are all part of this story. We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world … In Pynchon's hands, truther conspiracy theories never sounded so good. Something is definitely fucking rotten in the age of ‘post-late capitalism run amok’ … In Bleeding Edge, Pynchon has a jolly old time rousting about New York City — his vivacity, really, is quite unseemly for someone 76 years old – where in the world does he find all the energy? His writing is crisp and hilarious, laying waste all around him with city-that-never-sleeps abandon.
All of Pynchon's works are crammed with cultural references; here they seem less mysterious and significant than in previous novels. 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. 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 … It's fitting that Pynchon is tackling the near-present, because the real world has all but overtaken his elaborate, far-out fictions. 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.
Bleeding Edge is vintage Pynchon, a louche yarn of rollicking doomism. Pynchon is the master of technology-as-metaphor...Matryoshka dolls of motivation and meaning, vast interconnectivity, hidden influencers, false identity and real threats — the Internet is an actual version of Pynchon’s fiction. Metaphor-as-technology … Amid Maxine’s misadventures, what Pynchon conjures is the evolution of the military-industrial complex. The great hope of the dot-com era was openness, democracy, innovation. But what has largely emerged is the military-industrial-capital-surveillance complex — a nearly hermetic system of power and wealth — with only a gimlet-eyed New Yorker to map its terrain.
Focusing on the New York of 2001 and early 2002, Bleeding Edge is a new kind of historical novel, delving into the radical shifts in human consciousness brought about by the Internet, video games, quake films, digital espionage, cyber exploration and other ‘bleeding-edge’ technologies that just 12 years later now actually seem generations old. Hilarious references to Netscape and ‘Final Fantasy’ abound, but 9/11 looms large and the stakes here are real … Maxine and her family, friends and colleagues are also surprisingly rich and well developed as individual characters who stand for something much more human than some of the cardboard cutouts of Pynchon's early works. This new earnestness comes at an artistic cost, though, making this novel almost entirely conventional in terms of how it works and what it offers the reader.
Pynchon's latest detective caper revolves around the picaresque adventures of Maxine Tarnow, young Jewish Upper West Side mother of two elementary-school boys, sort of divorced from her ex. She is a wisecracking, fearless beauty who runs her own uncertified anti-fraud agency and carries a purse heavy with a Beretta … The Internet is a core character, too, from the underground Deep Web where online criminals hang, to the brilliant DeepArcher (think ‘departure’) alternative-reality, to alpha hackers who think that destroying the Internet means saving humanity … He remarkably handles that disturbing day of Sept. 11, tilting the story and everyone in it, stunning the reader into an alternative strange-times reality where Pynchon comfortably dwells. Yet he spends no more than a couple of pages on the actual attacks, reflecting instead on its effect on his characters.
The plot's dizzying profusion of murder suspects plays like something out of early Raymond Chandler, under whose bright star Bleeding Edge unmistakably unreels. Shoals of red herrings keep swimming by, many of them never seen again. Still, reading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex. Each page has a little more of it than the one before, but you never quite get to the clincher … Bleeding Edge is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces. All this, plus a stripjoint called Joie de Beavre and a West Indian proctologist named Pokemon. Who else does that?
...a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes … 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. If he’s sometimes heavy-handed, he’s also attuned precisely to the zeitgeist, drawing in references to Pabst Blue Ribbon longnecks, Mamma Mia, the Diamondbacks/Yankees World Series, Office Space, and the touching belief of young Zuckerbergs in the age before Zuckerberg that their bleeding-edge technology—’[n]o proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with’—will somehow be put to good use rather than, as Pynchon assures us, to the most evil applications.
