Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Bleeding Edge (edition 2014)by Thomas Pynchon (Author)
Work InformationBleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Thomas Pynchon does Neal Stephenson. ( ) An interesting read: the first time I've ready Pynchon writing in an era that I lived in. That makes his wacky characters and odd setups feel harder to swallow, because I'm matching them against a reality. (An older reader of Pynchon would probably feel this as normal.) At the same time, beautifully crystalline moments come up out of the prose, a Pynchon trademark, and they need the wacky around them to make them shine. Perfect references to: Psyduck, Daikatana, "I dropped the screw in the tuna," MGS, Nelly....the same guy who wrote GR perfectly captured 2001, pre and post you-know what, especially l33t culture, with of course plenty of paranoia, insane specificity, and New York in 2001, perfectly encapsulated. Maxine is a great heroine. I can't give the plot five stars, but it would be wrong to give the whole thing any less. America's greatest living writer, almost 50 years running.
[I]n Bleeding Edge Pynchon is prepared to handle material even chancier than Anti-Life or creature-feature cheese. As the organ reverberates, at the end of chapter nine, after someone in the summer of 2001 tells a nervous little New Yorker whose father works in the building that the WTC is built like a battleship, Pynchon declares his paradoxical readiness—under special, limited circumstances—to abandon irony entirely. At this moment—when innocence, irony’s eternal patsy, needs to be protected—the postmodern deflector shields buckle, then collapse, bathing the USS Bleeding Edge in a burst of parental love and remorse. No doubt a good genre book is worth more than a bad literary one any day, but when a writer with real genius squanders so much of his energy on clowning – and for an audience it's not at all clear he respects – it's worth asking what's going on. The idea that jokes are a defence against intimacy is a cliche – perhaps they can also be a defence against close reading. Pynchon depicts the world as he sees it, riddled by the depredations of greed, conspiracy and intolerance, of entropies both human-engineered and cosmically imposed. But his novels take the form of the world as he wishes it, hence their mighty powers of consolation. The freedoms and duties Pynchon assigns himself are those he desires on our behalf — lasciviousness, punning inanity, attention to the routinely sublime but also to the inevitability of suffering, love for the underdog and a home in our hearts for the dead. Also, license to attempt disappearance into some radical space adjacent to history, and to daily life — what the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey has called “Temporary Autonomous Zones” — even if the costs of such jaunts are, in the end, punishingly high. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
New York City, 2001. Fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO and discovers there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left of the tech bubble. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |