Bleeding Edge

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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 theme

Anyway 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 thought

Bleeding Edge is well worth reading, very funny, with a point to make, but V its not show less

Szerkezetében és világában a Kísérleti fázis sok hasonlóságot mutat a Beépített hibá-val, de én nem annyira annak ápdételt verziójának látom, mint inkább párdarabjának. Ami az előző könyvben Kalifornia a boldog ’70-es években, az itt New York az ezredfordulón. Ami ott az illúzióit lassan lepergető hippi-feeling, az itt a kibertér világa, a bűnbeesés pillanata előtt, után, közben. Ahogy azt a könyvet a háttérből meghatározza a Mansonok gyilkosságsorozata, úgy árnyékolja be ezt a dotkom buborék kipukkadása, a válság, és még valami: a közelgő szeptember 11. A regény szereplői öles léptekkel haladnak a World Trade katasztrófája felé – ők még nem tudják ezt, de mi tudjuk show more helyettük is, és alighanem ez a tudás teszi e könyvet nyugtalanítóbb, sötétebb szöveggé a Beépített hibá-nál. Szóval nem lepődnék meg, ha egy Nagy Amerikai Trilógia középső darabját tisztelhetnénk ebben a regényben – nyugati part kipipálva, keleti part kipipálva, talán nem sokára egy újabb konteóparádénak gyürkőzhet neki a fordító, ezúttal mondjuk Texas vagy Iowa színhellyel.

És hát igen, ez a nyelv… ez még mindig elképesztő. Első pillantásra könnyen emészthető tételről van szó sok lendületes, eleven párbeszéddel, de ez (vigyázat!) csapda. Amit a Súlyszivárvány-ban Pynchon a masszív szövegtextúrával ér el, arról itt a szereplők dialógusai gondoskodnak: az a sok kétértelműséggel, csak-félig-felfogható bennfentes dumával, utalásokkal és hivatkozásokkal teli héderelés teljesen elkábítja az olvasót, beviszi a posztmodern dzsungelbe, és konkrétan úgy érezzük, hogy ki sem keveredünk többé belőle… A Kísérleti fázis újabb remekmű az egyik legzseniálisabb kortárs írótól (Nobelt neki, de most azonnal!), egy paranoid zuhanás a deepweb világába, újabb pynchoni mese a Nagy Republikánus Hazugságról – XXI. századi klasszikus. Konteóhívőknek és ellen-konteóhívőknek melegen ajánlott. show less

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 show more 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. show less

A staggering weight comes across the shelf. It has happened before, but at this point in his career there are quite a few masterpieces to compare it to now. As America's greatest living novelist, each book he releases feels like it should be a bombshell, ever-escalating shocks of genius radiating out for as far as there's literary terrain left to expose to new light. Bleeding Edge, which is unquestionably a great novel, funny and moving and as clever as any number of competitors put together, is not on the same level of revelation as the Three Doorstops of Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day. It's instead by far the most "normal" book he's ever written, meaning it contains the fewest goofy songs, ludicrous Dickensian show more names, drug-addled digressions, or egregiously stupid/brilliant puns, though all of those elements definitely appear. I won't call it "mature", since he's been ahead of the game ever since his very first book, but this is his first novel to seem like it was written by a father, someone with real roots in the ordinary quotidian life of school days, sleepovers, and the rest of the thankless but necessary work done by any ordinary parent.

Maxine Tarnow, the star of this particular show, will conjure up inescapable memories of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49. They're similar in many ways, in only one of the elements of resonance that this book has with his earlier works - they're both smart, inquisitive women with husbands in varying stages of detachment, who investigate rapidly expanding mysteries with some degree of illumination, bafflement, and mildly erotic peril. Maxine is far more of a real human being, however, with a job, children, and friends, none of which Oedipa seemed to have. It's difficult to read the book's opening and closing scenes of maternal concern and not think that Pynchon's own fatherhood has changed his writing dramatically, in the sense of getting him more interested in the day-to-day details of people's lives, and less interested in stringing scenes together around obscure trivia he dredged up from an atlas or dictionary, as he claimed he used to do in his introduction to Slow Learner. Not only do people worry about their children in Bleeding Edge, they have real conversations; in particular, the banter between Maxine and her friend Heidi is some of the funniest dialogue he's ever written. Even Maxine's relationship arc with her ex-husband is well-done; the scene where their kids catch them slow-dancing together is a combination of funny and moving that he's done only rarely before.

Another change in his writing, besides the focus on grown-up themes, is how much calmer it's gotten, to the extent that it's hard to believe that he once wrote books featuring immortal light bulbs, robot ducks, or sentient tornadoes. He's still the same writer who seemed to know everything there was to know about the history of Malta, medieval postal societies, the orthography of Central Asian languages, or Chinese occult practices, but he's turned his eye back to New York City again, giving it much more attention and detail than he did when he used it as part of the setting of V. I once read a quote to the effect that New York is the only city you can write about without sounding provincial; whether that's true or not, since I can imagine it being both a small canvas for a great artist and an impossibly daunting one for a lesser artist, Pynchon gives the city the same treatment he's given to the more exotic locales he's used over the years, filling it with all the little details that will jump out at anyone who's ever visited or lived there. Additionally, instead of throwing in highbrow references to Maxwell's Demon or quaternions, there's Dragonball Z, Jennifer Aniston hair, Final Fantasy X, Pokémon, and countless more pop culture items, handled with a deftness amazing for a 76 year-old, or indeed most people. It's hard to write about pop culture and not sound clunky, if you're old, or shallow, if you write for an indie music review site, so although it's less "mindblowing" that he's writing about all this familiar everyday stuff instead of his more abstruse encyclopedia findings, his evocation of the 9/11 era is still impressive.

Speaking of 9/11, I really appreciated the way he handled it. It would be easy for a lesser writer to milk the event for tears and sentiment through some pompous literary overwriting, but instead everyone in the book behaves like a normal person and has exactly the kind of emotions you remember from 12 years ago. There's a nod to quasi-truther theories, but only as a way for him to work in his trademark paranoia theme, which aside from a joke or two like "Paranoia is the garlic in life's kitchen", is absent here to a degree greater than every other book aside from maybe Mason & Dixon in spite of Maxine's investigation's resemblances to Oedipa's famously paranoia-soaked quest. One irritating trope I've noticed among critics of his more recent works is this idea that he writes "shaggy dog" stories - that is, his books are merely extended versions of the famous "We're the aristocrats!" routine or that knock-knock joke that ends in "Orange you glad I didn't say banana again?" - the implication is that Pynchon is just stringing the reader along like a sucker, rambling on about paranoia, conspiracies, and so forth, teasing with the possibility of meaning, and then ending his books with a yuk and a rimshot, cheating them of the glorious sense of emotional, aesthetic, and narrative closure you get in a true masterpiece like, say, a Jonathan Franzen novel. I would be tempted to dismiss this stupid, borderline illiterate criticism as either sour grapes or straightforward philistinism, but I was glad to see that Pynchon decided to make fun of that line of thinking himself with a literal Shaggy dog story, a description of the unfortunately fictional "Scooby Goes Latin!" cartoon Maxine's kids are watching:

"Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost - what else - of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.
The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. "And I would've got away with it, too," he complains, "if it hadn’t been for those Medellín kids!"

I personally can't get enough of those amazing/retarded puns, and I vehemently disagree that they make the book any less meaningful. Where did this idea come from that the only way to make real points about life is to be as grim and unsmiling as possible? To embed a silly throwaway joke like that into a scene of parental worry and care might strike some as perversely unserious, but I prefer to think of it as a greater appreciation for the way that different feelings can coexist with each other at the same time, as well as an admirable refusal to let a good joke go to waste (though it's not as ludicrous as Gravity's Rainbow's incredible "For De Mille, young fur-henchmen can't be rowing" pun). It's not like the book doesn't have a lot of feelings in it, despite the existence of things like strip clubs called Joie de Beavre; on the contrary it has plenty of moments as heartfelt as Roger and Jessica's doomed love affair, Mason and Dixon's enduring friendship, or the fidelity of the Chums of Chance. The DeepArcher webspace that drives Maxine's actions becomes, instead of a bland technothriller or cringe-inducing salad of unhip hacker jokes, a great vehicle for ideas about freedom, privacy, and choice, which will resonate even for those not as infamously attention-averse as Pynchon.

To the extent that it's possible to be disappointed by this book, it can only be due to a failure to meet impossibly lofty expectations, that every Pynchon novel will be a brand new wildly soaring V2 rocket of words airbursting new relationships to Art, Life, and Literature above the reader's head each time. As a massive fan of his, it's true that Mason & Dixon was the last time I felt that Pynchon was writing with the sense that he had something to prove; certainly there's nothing here that would challenge anyone in the same way that his earlier tomes did and still do. Yet it's impossible to read this product of time and experience and not feel amused, entertained, and moved. I'll leave it to future generations of critics to determine exactly where in the literary hierarchy this portrait of a city and country at a critical moment fits; as a fan of words in books, I thought it was great. show less

Somewhat idiotically, when I started this novel I didn’t realise it was Pynchon’s take on 9/11. I read it because it gave me the impression of being funny. It was certainly more digestible than [b:Vineland|59721|Vineland|Thomas Pynchon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1357603865l/59721._SY75_.jpg|1934], the only other Pynchon I’ve tackled to date. As hoped, ‘Bleeding Edge’ was indeed funny, in fact I would describe its mood as ludic, febrile, and madcap. That is, until the date September 11th arrives. Thereafter the pace stalls, although by the end it has accelerated back to its previous speed. The narrative follows around Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator, as she investigates possible show more conspiracies whilst dealing with a huge cast of friends, frenemies, troublesome family members, acquaintances, colleagues, ex-husbands, friends-of-friends, and persons miscellaneous. One thing I love about Pynchon is his ear for a great name, which I noticed in [b:Vineland|59721|Vineland|Thomas Pynchon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1357603865l/59721._SY75_.jpg|1934]. Memorable forenames in this novel include Tallis, March, Horst, Driscoll, and Igor. Given the huge cast, it seemed vital to read the book in large chunks to avoid giving my brain the chance to forget who they all were.

As to whether ‘Bleeding Edge’ provides a deep insight into America before and after 9/11, I’m not sure. How would I know? It conveys a certain atmospheric shift very effectively and the foreshadowing is suitably portentous yet bathetic. There was a certain self-conscious cleverness and superficiality to the dialogue that I enjoyed. I ground my teeth at the use of ‘sez’ for ‘says’, but liked it when such verbs were skipped altogether, for example, “Hey Brooke?” Maxine eventually’. Pynchon’s distinctive style appeals to me, perhaps more than the actual happenings of the book did. I assume that the point was for the plot to be oblique and unresolved, to increase the sense of being at the fringe of incomprehensible events. Overall, it was picaresque and fun in a peculiar way. One of these days I must tackle the grand tome [b:Against the Day|409|Against the Day|Thomas Pynchon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1276429450l/409._SY75_.jpg|3016553]. show less

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 show more not in the know, you sometimes don't know what the hell is being said. show less