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Bleeding Edge
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Bleeding Edge
Unavailable
Bleeding Edge
Audiobook18 hours

Bleeding Edge

Written by Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by Jeannie Berlin

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th, Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics--carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts-without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom-two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood-till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 17, 2013
ISBN9780698143241
Unavailable
Bleeding Edge

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Rating: 3.4751773645390074 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

282 ratings27 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My friends and I created our online reading group samizdat in the summer of 1999. Our first selection was Gravity's Rainbow and we've made a number of efforts since then to recreate that cherry high. Those distant days of yahoo and dial up are recreated in Bleeding Edge, though most of its characters play with a heavier set of clubs. The Kabbalic notion of a deep web where the eschatological becomes, well, virtual is hardly a new idea. Pynchon drapes it all in a noir apparatus with a crime scene at Ground Zero.

    Pynchon goes with a female protagonist, Maxine - mother of two and fraud investigator - Frau investigator. It has been a long time since Oedipa Mass and I think Maxine finds her form with verve. It is rife with all the standard Pynchonian parodies. There is a biopic channel where all notable personalities receive 100 minute, big screen treatment. there are song lyrics at every turn and an entire football roster of blurry men on the grassy knoll. There are fingers pointed to Wahabi networks funded from dot.com dividends, a scratchy DVD showing a fail-safe with Stinger missles being used if the planes didn't complete their mission. There is also a host of Mossad and Russians running around, not to mention an entire room of Jihadis with an ElectroMagnetic Pulse. Oh well, one shouldn't expect subtlety.

    There is a scene towards the end where Maxine is discussing the internet with her father. He rebukes here deterritorialized utopian view and tells her point blank that it was designed by cold warriors, that intent has to linger.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

    Sigh... There is no question Pynchon is a talented writer. There is also no question that while he is writing circles around his reader he loses them along the way and unfortunately I was one of those readers this time out. The main character was too passive and ultimately was consumed by the plot.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Great characters (although too many to keep track of)Loved the cultural references - but the plot????
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a sublime experience. Jeannie Berlin does not perform the work as much as she creates it. Never before have I described an audiobook presentation as ballsy, but that is what this is. With this novel, Pynchon reveals what many suspected all along -- California was just a dream for him; Pynchon has been grounded in New York his whole life. Hands down the best New York novel (ever?) of at least the last fifty years. Just when you thought the old con artist has no more tricks up his sleeve we get this.Why did I like Jeannie Berlin's performance so damn much? Other fools have attacked it. I guess they don't feel they are getting their money's worth from an audiobook unless it is read by Jeremy Irons. Jeannie Berlin's voice, a slightly nasally approaching tenor drawl with subdued New Yawk notes, becomes a new character in the novel, adding onto Pynchon's masterwork, rather than merely performing it. She is the voice of the Jewish over-mother that used to rule New York but has been silenced by money and assimilation. Berlin's voice is jarringly haunting for the first two discs, but by the final two it is a warm thorny blanket of love and judgment.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I went through an extended phase--mid-teens through mid-twenties or so--where my reading selections were painstakingly, self-consciously chosen from the canon--classic, modern, post-modern. I read voraciously (dozens and dozens of titles which I would have done better to wait and read as a more mature person) and almost exclusively chose titles I thought would, well, make me look smart. Ah, callow youth! I remember an instance when I was living at home and my dad came into my roomto say good-bye before he and my mom went out. I was waiting for a couple of friends to come over, and dad slyly noted the Ferlinghetti--Tyrannus Nix?, which I still own--I had carefully/casually tossed on the table next to my reading chair. I blushed in recognition of my own pretentiousness, but left the volume where it was. I also shopped for books in this manner--how else would I have books of literary merit to strew about if not for the Grove Press, Evergreen, and New Directions paperbacks I bought every time I walked into a used book store? Of the hundreds of books I read and mostly forgot during thoseyears a few did manage to leave their imprint. Of those few, the one that I kept going back to, reading and rereading, the one that I claimed as favorite, the one that inspired me to pursue the author's too-small body of work (and everything I could find about that body of work), was Gravity's Rainbow. I've long since abandoned any literary pretensions--I read what I want, regardless of genre, and other people's opinions be damned--but I still love this book and wait eagerly for each of Pynchon's infrequent new ones. I don't always manage to finish them (you know his oeuvre--I'll leave you to imagine which ones didn't do it for me), but when Pynchon has a hit with me, it's a smash.All of which leads me to Bleeding Edge. It's set in the very early aughts, from just after the dot-com bubble bust till just after the events of 9/11. Maxine Tarnow--mother of two, more or less divorced, lifetime denizen of Manhattan--is a rogue fraud investigator (she investigates corporate fraud...but, since her license was yanked, in an unofficial sort of way). As the book opens she's drawn into an investigation of hashslingrz.com, a company--run by a charismatic if shady gazillionaire named Gabriel Ice--that survived the bust fairly spectacularly. Her investigation--conducted while juggling the ferrying of her two boys back and forth to school, hosting (and all that that implies) her ex who's back in town, nursing an unholy attraction to a black ops government guy who is probably an assassin, and playing video games--takes her to the Deep Web (it's a thing--I looked it up!--and it's vast and scary and truly Pynchonian in the immensity of its scope and the darkness of its depths), the interstitial areas of New York landmarks, and beyond.Maxine's journey is much like that of her predecessor, Oedipa Maas. As she pursues her quest she's drawn into an underworld full of true believers--hackers and gamers and developers--and fanatics, paranoids and conspiracy theorists, scenes of crystalline, hallucinatory beauty, and of abject horror. The more she unravels the mystery the deeper it gets and the more she's drawn into it. And then 9/11 happens, and my ability to synopsize collapses in on itself.Pynchon's eye and ear are keen, his descriptions hilarious and devastating, his prose breathtakingly beautiful. There are the striving yuppies of the 80s, who by Bleeding Edge's time have [d]evolved into "Yups." A visit to Ikea, which makes one shudder in recognition: "Exits are clearly marked but impossible to get to." And his take on post 9/11 New York, which is quietly, painfully scathing. "Child choirs from churches and schools around town are booked weeks in advance for solemn performances at 'Ground Zero,' with 'America the Beautiful' and 'Amazing Grace' being musical boilerplate at these events." Bleeding Edge is, like Vineland, like Inherent Vice, deceptive in its accessibility. You're reading along, enjoying the zaniness of the cast of characters and the wackiness of the assorted acronyms and movements and pop cultural phenomena that Pynchon creates, reveling in his language and how easy he makes it all seem, and then it hits you: this is some deep shit. Just because it's trite doesn't make it any less true: the post-internet, post-9/11 world is hell and gone from the world that came before, and Pynchon's the best guide yet to help to put it in perspective. And you get to have so much fun along the way. That's why I love Pynchon so much.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    It's unusual for me to quit a book but I had to give up on this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    More complicated than Inherent Vice but accessible and modern like The Crying of Lot 49, Bleeding Edge combines technology subculture, a Jewish patter, and entertaining verbal wizardry into an enjoyable, involved novel.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Lost me about a third of the way through, and I remember the line: a throwaway at the end of a paragraph about Maxine, who I guess has a sweet tooth, having been diagnosed with "Chocolate Deficiency Syndrome." Really, Tom, chocolate deficiency? That joke was a wheezer thirty years ago, but I guess the capitalized Syndrome thing is all that's needed to Pynchonize it back to life?The whole book (to where I gave up) is like that, Pynchon sweating mightly (flop-sweating) to write derivative Pynchon. Dad jokes hoping to come off as effervescent Pop riffing. All the mannerism of V and Gravity's Rainbow but nothing of the drive or the angry inner logic. Endless scenes-that-aren't-really-scenes of people breezily explaining things to one another and it all just resolves into a kind of toneless hum after awhile. He tries to piggyback on post-9/11 history to give the logorrheic maundering some urgency but never comes near pulling it off.Which is maybe where the problem is. The information world of the early 21st century only seems like it's a perfect target for Pynchon's shtick. The paranoid mode in his great work had a warped revelatory quality that, within a society aggressively vaunting its own freedom and openness, gave it almost the force of samizdat. But we live now in a surveillance state so far acknowledged (and unchallenged) it no longer needs to care whether its own secrets are concealed; when everything is on the Internet, equally available and equally inconsequential, the cultural margin on which Pynchon once worked has vanished. This book makes him more spectator than author, a tired (but spry! if grotesquely) self-imitation.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There's a surreal, dream-like quality to the book. On the surface it feels very shallow, depicting a Jewish mother/fraud investigator in New York in 2001. She looks and sounds very much like what you would expect, except with a bit more humor and wit to her. The characters and interactions she has with them appear shallow - yup - but dig deeper and you'll find more heart and meaning to these encounters.

    However, it all feels very on the nose, crass even. Reading it took me a lot longer than expected, owing mostly to the language and the 'references', so to speak. Pychon has other, much better stories - this one's a pass.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Basically unreadable. Uninteresting; too cute and too precious by 3/4; wanted to stop at 75 pages in, skipped to Chapter 30, no better, tossed against the wall. Jeez.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I grabbed this book even though it is rather outside my typical readings. I really needed it for one of my more specific reading challenges and I saw that it was also tagged as mystery - a genre that I really like. I had some doubts but I generally like this book.

    I would not call this book a typical mystery although there are a lot of suspense threads, puzzles and murders here. And they are quite interesting.

    What definitely makes this book stand out is its very specific writing style. On the one hand, it's kind of torn, full of understatements and allusions. Sometimes you get the impression that some words are missing in a sentence, but you still understand the general meaning. Scenes change quickly, you jump from one to the other. This is not unpleasant, although it probably may not suit everyone.

    The second issue is onirism, the boundaries between the real and the unreal world are blurred. You don’t know where reality ends and where fantasy and dream begin. Which is of course the author's deliberate intention. Maxie, the main character, herself has problems distinguishing what is real and what is only the computer world of DeepArcher.

    To some point, the entire story is based around various conspiracy theories regarding the 9/11 attacks. Maxie is simultaneously at the center of these events and a little to the side. Other cases that she leads mix with those potentially related to 9/11.

    I have some serious problems gathering my feelings about this book enough to write a consistent review. On the one hand, this story is rather beyond my comfort zone, on the other hand, I am surprised how easily and quickly I read it. I thought I would struggle with this book for a long time, it is not short after all. But it didn't happen, I didn't have much trouble reading it. What's more, I may read this author's other book in the future, maybe not yet, but one day.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    One of the few books that I have started reading and just could not finish. Substandard storytelling, bizarre names, unrealistic dialogue, and strange (for the sake of being strange?) diversions. Really liked the premise of this book, but no matter how hard I tried to stay with it, I just kept fighting it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Whatever you do read the paper version of this book and not the audiobook. The woman who reads it is simply not up to the task. Many of the characters sound the same and she commonly emphasized the wrong words in the dialogue. This is a very witty and creative novel with many unique characters and much of this is lost in the interesting and awarded novel. What accents she does use you still hear the ever present reader under the surface. This is a vast and complex story that certainly deserves to be read and not listened to and I really regretted my choice of medium.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So everyone has their Pynchon history, and so here's mine. I loved V, found Gravity's Rainbow momentous but to be truthful hard going in places, liked Vineland well enough and can honestly say I cant' remember a thing about Against The Day so much so that I seriously doubt I have read it, even though Library Thing tells me I have. Bleeding Edge then... setting novels in the historical recent past is a challenging thing to pull off , you keep asking yourself whether some cultural reference or another had really happened by then. Mostly Pynchon gets it right, but he cant help a few smart alec references to the known future. The Internet on your mobile! Wearable devices! Tracking by government forces!! The death of privacy!!! Yes, all very easy with the benefits of hindsight but in 2001 we were still trying to find utility in SMS - we were, honestly. I used to do telco research and "why on earth would I want to message someone instead of phone them" was a common themeAnyway I digress. This is Pynchon as avuncular Uncle Thomas. He sets his scene in the New York of 2001 - and I kind of wish he'sdset it a year earlier so he could have had some fun with the Millenium bug - but anyway his subject is the emerging dot com industry and its transformation from geek niche to big business. His characters are zany, yet recognisable - private investigators, coders striking it big with something that looks and feels very much like Second Life, or at least what Second Life could have been, malevolant entrepreneurs, code monkeys, denizens of the deep web, Russians, mafiosi, and sundry recognizable New York "types". You think its going to be Pynchon's 9/11 book - its not, and thank goodness for that, but 9/11 happens and for Pynchon the effect is to make the American population regress - to take comfort in the known, to become infantile and allow the suppression of rights and to ditch liberty and democracy in favour of the comforts of an extended endless adolescence. We will regret this trade off he suggests - but maybe we wont even notice it. He also identifies 9/11 as the point at which the "newspaper of record" (ie the mainstream media) and the Internet diverge - basically there is no established truth anymore, you believe what you want, it doesn't matter its not going to change anything anyway . Some of his characters believe in a 9/11 conspiracy; others don't. You get the feeling that Pynchon perhaps does - but whatever, it certainly lead to the victory of those who want to control the Internet and turn into a tool of commerce over those that wanted it to be a tool of a new Renaissance. We're going to hell in a handcart, this book suggests, but really, we've lost the will to do anything about it, and probably we can't even recognise it as it happens. So why worry? As I say, its avuncular Bleeding Edge is gentle with its protagonists though; most are treated warmly except the malevolent Gabriel Ice (who could he be modelled on, lets think......) . There are some great jokes; one scene in a Karaoke bar seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of a joke about Toto's song Africa, which is so good I won't spoil it here. Another one about the Columbia cartels has been invented purely for a pun about Medellin kids, and another simply to facilitate a pay off line about relying on the comfort of stranglers. In the meantime various obvious and slow moving early naughties stereotypes are mercilessly lampooned. His description of a site, DeepArcher, that sounds a lot like Second Life, is so uncannily familiar that you wonder whether the notoriously privacy jealous Pynchon might have been spending a bit of time there himself. Its an intriguing thoughtBleeding Edge is well worth reading, very funny, with a point to make, but V its not
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very funny, but too unbelievable to be compelling. I felt like much of this territory has all ready been well traversed by William Gibson.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is another substandard effort; his third in a row. After the long silence, the much-maligned Vineland seems to be the touchstone for these later novels. I had expected to read a lot about the Internet in this one, but I wasn't prepared for the onslaught. The Internet not only provides plenty of opportunities to create narratives of labyrinthine complexity involving all the usual Pynchonesque tropes (conspiracies, betrayal, paranoia, manipulation, etc.), but also to cram in as many references as possible to memes, video games, hipster venues, hacker history, and operating system in-jokes,and in the most gratuitous manner. And once you remove the latter, there's really not much meat here. Other than conveying a real sense of dislocation, of the superficiality of early 21th century life in Manhattan, of the seemingly endless pursuit of entertainment or life-meaning in the chaotic mazes of both the "meatspace" and the "Deep Web", the book has no real plot, and maybe that's the point. As usual, there's no really sympathetic characters here other than the kids (although they seem on track to becoming like the adults on display). It's all pretty joyless, unless you've signed on for the duration (and one wonders how long that fascination with consumer technology can last without becoming late-stage, incurable alienation).It seems that Pynchon sees that the traditions of the established institutions of religion have been replaced with rather meaningless personal obsessions, which is especially evident once the towers have come down; other than a minor blip in everyone's everyday routine, it's business as usual. But having replaced some attempt to make sense of reality, these obsessions -- in this no longer moral universe -- can cause some seriously unpleasant behavior. It's difficult to see enough under the surface of Pynchon's characters. Is there anything there?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ahhh, Pynchon. I'll admit to never having been a fan. This is better than everything else I've tried: there's an actual narrative. The prose is clever, as always, but I just find it all a little too cute. Held my interest, just about, but not really to my taste.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Bleeding Edge is a mystery story with an unlikely investigator, Maxine Tarnow. She runs a small fraud-investigation agency in New York City called "Tail `Em and Nail `Em." Her specialty is to find hidden illegal fund diversions below the surface of apparently legitimate businesses. In addition to her regular cases, Maxine is approached by Reg Despard a documentary film producer who travels around NYC creating interesting cassettes that he sells on the street. Reg tells Maxi he has gained some mysterious attention with his latest production that he is told is far ahead of the leading edge of the post-modern art forms he sells.It seems Reg has crossed paths with a computer-security firm downtown called "hashlingerz" run by CEO Gabriel Ice a boy billionaire who walked away rich and unscathed from the dotcom implosion in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Maxi is used to going below the surface of businesses in her investigations of fraud using computer spread sheets. But, she does not know how deep fraud can be until she gets mixed up with the Internet prophet Gabriel Ice. He has power like the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in his policing of the characters that hang out in the bleeding edge of cyberspace. This is a strange gray area (like outer territories on map programs) that gamers and other computer geeks enter and use to drop clandestine links like sign posts for fellow players. Maxi explores hashlingerz to see if Ice's intentions are good, bad, or beyond moral positioning.Maxine is not as pure as the driven snow even though she is a responsible woman who takes good care of her children, has good friends, and allows visits to her apartment and emotional connections with her family and ex-husband, Horst. Investigating fraud requires the use of some techniques that are not only legally questionable but actually are over the edge of the law. Caught and burned in the past, Maxi has lost her Certified Fraud Examiner's license. A moral individual in her social life, she must break the rules sometimes during her work on cases.The novel follows Maxine Tarnow as she looks into Gabriel Ice's operations meeting many quirky denizens of the bleeding edge of the Internet. Carrying a small caliber handgun, Maxi is well aware of the dangers she and her family are exposed to when she moves around NYC and gathers information from human and electronic sources.I was reading along one day on my iPad using my Kindle program when Maxi was randomly clicking on visible pixels in the gray display of the bleeding edge looking for clues. After changing her dimensional view of her screen to reveal links, she clicked on a minute star-like image. I felt a mental click that took me to a section of Pynchon's earlier novel, Against the Day. Suddenly, I was in one of the vector fields embedded in that novel - a connection between the content of two novels in my mind as unconscious as the release of repressed memories. Gabriel Ice's hashlingerz technology could gain control of an unlimited number of vectors (characters) in more than one area of the bleeding edge (novels) at a level unknown to most readers via calculus (software) predictions based on surreptitious observations. Talk about the invasion of personal space and mind control by government and linked private agencies, Mr. Pynchon shows us there are no moral edges for the real but unknown leaders of the social world embedded in cyberspace. Conspiracy theories (JFK, 911, NYSE, ICE) take on whole new meanings in Bleeding Edge (and Against the Day). I give this new novel my highest recommendation to readers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow.Wow wow wow.I lived through the late nineties Silicon Alley phenomenon when it felt like it was falling apart (my first company changed from a Systems to a Solutions to a Razorfish in the span of a year), and Pynchon did an excellent job of capturing it. The book was people with the usual Pynchon-esque conspiracies, bagfuls of characters, genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, and touching come downs, as well.I actually enjoyed Pynchon's take on 11 September, as well as the craziness of some of those Silicon Alley days, but it's just how Pynchon writes so effortlessly, I love lines like:"Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.""If you were doing something in secret and didn't want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?"Some of the lines are cheesy, like "Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll," but even in those you get the sense of a man completely happy in what he's doing, which is writing a breathtaking novel which speeds along through the Upper West Side and a changing New York City.At any rate, I loved this book, laughed out loud a lot while I was reading it, and enjoyed Mr. Pynchon's take on early 2000s New York City.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Pynchon is not for everyone. He is incredibly creative and his intelligence and vast cultural knowledge makes him very entertaining for me. However, this did not help me with Mason and Dixon(quit it after a 100 pages) and I was not ready for Against the Day(1,000 pages) but Inherent Vice was short and great and Bleeding Edge at 475 was just the right length(maybe a bit long). If you have not read any Pynchon but like fast paced absurd plots with lots of characters then try this out. The book takes place in New York after the 2000 dot com collapse and through 9/11. It deals heavily with the internet and its reference to technologies that arenow common place such as facebook and you tube are fun. It is hard to believe the Pynchon is 76 because if you didn't know better you would have thought that this was written by someone half his age. If you have read Pynchon and like him, then read this. If you haven't read Pynchon than start with Inherent Vice and if you like that then try Bleeding Edge.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Six-word review:Crackling technothriller coheres like a hallucination.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I expect Pynchon to be weird and complex, so this was consistent! The novel takes place in New York, spanning a period before and after 9/11. There is a very intricate intrigue involving game development, international spying, and entrepreneurial attempts to take over the world. Pynchon creates absurd contemporary characters, such as a man who can smell things so distinctly that his abilities can be used to help solve murders. You have to laugh, but this is intertwined with some very unnerving questions about who is controlling what in our computer-run world, while we are all oblivious to their plans. Which may or may not come to anything at all. The reading is not easy going. The slang of 90s New York demands attention and if you're not in the know, you sometimes don't know what the hell is being said.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I can't say I've completely loved any of the Pynchon novels I've read (which is basically all of them except the mammoth ones: GR, M&D, and ATD), but there were always aspects that I liked; the historical convergence of V or the heartfelt feelings of Vineland.Bleeding Edge on the other hand... It just feels so vapid. I didn't feel like there was anything more to it than knowing nods and winks courtesy of hindsight. Lightweight Pynchon isn't bad: Inherent Vice was a great read, regardless of how straightforward it was. Bleeding Edge doesn't even have that humour though. Instead it just plods along through a very mundane setting and a very mundane plot, with nothing much to say about 9/11 or the internet or conspiracy theories. And now he's writing about an age that I've experienced firsthand, I couldn't help but feel Pynchon's pop-culture nods were either lame or somewhat out of place. Whether that would have happened if I'd been around at the time of some of his other novels, I don't know, but it was disappointing all the same.Sometimes I've come away from Pynchon baffled or confused, but never bored or feeling vacant. Bleeding Edge really didn't do anything for me. Maybe it's a novel that came too soon for Pynchon. Perhaps because of his age he rushed it out, without letting it mature in his mind? It certainly feels incredibly lightweight.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Okay, first things first, DO NOT get the audiobook. You cannot begin to imagine how bad a reader can be. I regret every negative thing I have ever said about a reader because all up to now have been geniuses compared to Jeanne Berlin. I took the audio back to the library after 4 of 17 disks and got the book. Turns out, once I was out of Jeanne Berlin induced hell, the book was pretty delightful.No mistake about it, this is Pynchon-lite, as so many have mentioned. I loved V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Crying of Lot 49 as much as the next girl, but I don't always look for that level of challenge from my reading choices. This book requires much less, though still a fair bit, from the reader. Written in Pynchon-speak with sub-references and digressions aplenty the book takes a smart and broadly well-informed reader. I enjoyed the silly dig at 9-11 conspiracy theorists. I was delighted by the nod to our need for villains, the central casting part moving from Boris & Natasha type Russians, to Muslims, to tech billionaires. I laughed at the pretty dead-on portrayal of the modern Upper West Side Jewish mother, and her Workman's Circle era parents. I take off a star for a few lengthy digressions that messed with the pace of the book (and with noir, pacing really matters) and which a judicious editor would have done away with, and for some repetitive "jokes" that show that sometimes even Thomas Pynchon, whose mind and writing skill surpass most all other comers, is not as clever as he thinks. Highly recommend this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bleeding Edge is something strange, that’s for certain. Thomas Pynchon’s most recent book probably won’t win many awards, nor will it feature too prominently in the Pynchon hall of fame (seemingly capped with Mason and Dixon, after the most recent trifecta of Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge didn’t quite live up to people’s expectations). It’s a book that feels small, one summer and fall in New York city, with none of the drama of world war II, or the normal tension which comes from your average detective plot. It’s a book which doesn’t get distracted, doesn’t follow too many tangents, and doesn’t quite conclude, although that last one is also par for the Pynchon course. Maxine Loeffler is an ex-CPA, someone who does forensic accounting with a heck of a lot more legwork and a minimum of time spent staring at books. Her two children, Ziggy and Otis, just on the cusp of teen years, and her somewhat estranged husband Horst is off somewhere or another, and she doesn’t particularly care. Her days are filled with fraud and matchmaking, a messenger who always brings the right package at the right time, and a bevy of bizarre Manhattan acquaintances. And, of course, it’s April 2001. Silicon Alley is almost done contracting at the tail of the Dot-Com collapse, and there’s a strange air about the city. A little too much money flowing in and out from the middle east, a little bit too much in the way of sabotage and corruption. Maxine finds herself embroiled, in a typical Pynchon fashion, in a series of plots and capers, saving someone from Bernie Madoff, looking into those buying up fiber optic networks, pissing off the Russian mob and the ex-neoliberal-CIA in town to keep an eye on her brother law. She travels to Montauk, and (god forbid) Jersey City, all in pursuit of her truth, alcohol, and more than a little bit of grass. Oh, and a computer program that’s equal parts World of Warcraft, Google, and maybe, just maybe, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.The novel is packed with typical Pynchon panache. Keep an eye out for endless Lifetime movies starring a cavalcade of well known actors, culminating in Leo DiCaprio in a fat suit. There’s a Marx Brothers take on Don Giovanni, all references to the Devil removed. A prescient MILF night happens at a strip joint, and wine a plenty is spilled over the course of one break-in to someone’s home. The whole book drips with funny nonsense, making it as integral as the fledgling plot.Ultimately, Bleeding Edge is a book for those of us who like Thomas Pynchon. It’s a book that never quite resolves itself, feeling more like a chronicle of a time and a place than of a story. But perhaps that was what was needed. It’s been 14 years since 2001, and this book was written around the 10 year mark. 10 years later, we might not have all the words that we needed. We certainly didn’t at the time. So perhaps it’s fitting that the story never quite comes into focus. Sure, all of the elements are there, and they can be resembled into a hero, a villain, a supporting and essential cast, but that doesn’t quite feel like the point, just as understanding who the hijakers were, and how exactly it all went down wasn’t the point.One of my favorite places in New York, until they cleared it a little bit more, was Ground Zero. You could come off the train, and be THERE, and be overwhelmed by it. I always remembered, when I was at Ground Zero, what I had been doing on Tuesday, the 11th of September, 2001. And I’m willing to bet that Pynchon knows exactly where he was, too. It disrupted our stories, and added new ones, and made us try to fight for the plot again. So, in that sense, this is a fitting tribute, one lens of looking at a time that we were all shaped by. Or maybe that’s just me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Seems to be totally good researched and everybodys darling but I simply didn´t get it. Finished all the 600 pages and liked some parts but it looks like i didn´t get the overall plot. Maybe I am too dumb.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There've been a few novels written about the 11th September 2001 attacks – DeLillo's Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close come to mind – and most of them try to induce, not unreasonably, a visceral and immediate reaction to the tragedy. Pynchon has written about atrocities and tragedies before (most recently in Against the Day), but what's striking about Bleeding Edge is how determined Pynchon is to avoid talking about 9/11 in anything like the same terms. After huge amounts of foreshadowing, the event itself is thrown away almost in passing two thirds of the way through the novel, a remote occurrence that comes mediated through strangers and TV:Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same time. Something bad is going on downtown. ‘A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,’ according to the Indian guy behind the counter.‘What, like a private plane?’‘A commercial jet.’Uh-oh. Maxine goes home and pops on CNN.What follows is a lengthy examination not of the event itself – which is merely the pretext for a lot of conspiracy-theoretic playfulness – but rather of how people reacted to it. Pynchon sounds angry about it, angrier than I can remember him sounding for a long time. Typically, he hones right in on the vocabulary, objecting in particular to‘Ground Zero,’ a Cold War term taken from the scenarios of nuclear war so popular in the early sixties. This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat ‘Ground Zero’ over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology. The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.Ah, the ‘purpose’. As with many of his books, it's never clear whose purpose, exactly, we're talking about, but there is a strong sense that there's one out there. Something to do with keeping everyone staring at the replaying images on the news channels, US citizens reduced to ‘a viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless’. ‘Can't you feel it,’ one character asks—‘how everybody's regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood.’This sense of opportunity wasted runs throughout the book. The other opportunity under examination is the internet. The book is set in large part among the early 2000s geek culture, and there is a feeling of almost limitless potential that's about to be exploited or squandered. One pair of programmers has developed an interface for trawling the deep web (a version of the deep web that I don't think ever existed), and their software is being pursued aggressively by ultracapitalists and national governments – they're facing thesame old classic dotcom dilemma, be rich forever or make a tarball out of it and post it around for free, and keep their cred and maybe self-esteem as geeks but stay more or less middle income.The internet for Pynchon is a way of transcending the constraints of reality – characters can log on and have conversations with people who seem already to be dead, victims of 9/11, victims of secret governmental machinations, whatever…an online version of the much-misunderstood ‘thanatoids’ from Vineland. The web offers a vision of the almost spiritual interconnectedness of humanity, it's a ‘small part of a much vaster integrated continuum’. And yet at the same time this is somehow thematically tied to the twin towers, so that when they come down, the possibilities of this new medium also seem increasingly to be built on very shaky ground.And all of this is told in Pynchon's characteristically sly, amused, polymathic, stoned-incisive American narrative voice which fascinates me as much as it ever did. He writes dialogue like no one on earth: having spent the last few books doing away with such irritating formalities as ‘he said’, ‘she replied’ etc., he now relays lines of speech with no finite verbs at all, merely leaving you with a few present participles like the stage directions to a radio play:‘So…’ some presentable young lady spreading her upturned palms, ‘warm and friendly here, right?’‘And after the stories we heard,’ Lucas nodding, gazing amiably at her tits.And this technique, writ large, is how he works at the level of paragraph and novel as well. He no longer does the boring necessities; he's found a way to jump straight from incident to incident. Key events or explanations arrive, smilingly without reason; characters bump into each other, simply because it is now necessary that they meet. (‘It seems accidental’, we are told at one point, ‘but there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else.’)He still believes as strongly as ever in the power of triviality and jokes, which is one of the reasons I'm able to take him so seriously. In this book we have comments about a woman on the side ‘stashed in London he's playing FTSE with’ – cute – a strip club called Joie de Beavre, and a long description of a Scooby-Doo cartoon set in Colombia which concludes with the line, ‘and I would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those Medellín kids!’His long ecstatic flights of descriptive fantasy are fewer here than in some earlier books, but he still puts phrases together perfectly when he needs to. Here's the last description we have of one character:He's silent, wherever he is. By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast in the storm.Elsewhere attention focuses in on the sky, which is very typical of Pynchon: the threat in his books is always either somewhere above you, or deep below your feet. The sky here ‘takes on a brushed-aluminum underglow’; and later it's ‘a pale battle flag of the ancient nation of winter’. (I love that.) Near the end, our heroine notices ‘clouds moving across a smear of light, maybe the sun, maybe something else’, which is precisely the sort of minatory vagueness that Pynchon has made all his own. There is a paragraph along similar lines in Against the Day, and for that matter in this context one can't help also thinking of the famous opening line to Gravity's Rainbow.How does he do it? There are lines in his books I read over and over and I still have the feeling that the sense can't be reduced to the words on the page. And this may be the last book we get from him: he was 76 when it came out, half a century since the publication of V. You don't expect people in their mid-seventies to be writing about (to pick an example from this book almost at random) a couple dressing up for Hallowe'en respectively as ‘a NAND gate and Aki Ross from the Final Fantasy movie’.Bleeding Edge does include one para that's as good a summary of Pynchon's general philosophy as any:‘No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,’ it seemed to Heidi, ‘these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.’What he's been bringing us for fifty years. And still showing people a third of his age how it should be done.