What’s It About

Set in 2001, Maxine Tarnow, an ex-licensed fraud examiner, gets sucked into the shady world of the Deep Web and half baked conspiracy theories as she examines the suspicious goings on at hashslingrz, a computer security firm run by Gabriel Ice.

Should I Read It?

If you’re a Pynchon fan, then yes. If you’re not, then I’d read a sample. Pynchon has a particular style and sense of humour that, going by a quick skim of the interwebs, can be divisive (also see The Commentary). This particualr story is a mess, often drifting into irrelevant tangents and introducing a whole number of quirky, weird, outsiders. Having said that, for the most part I enjoyed the novel’s anarchic nature, reflecting the chaos that was the internet after the dot.com crash. Pynchon’s askew treatment of 9/11 is also interesting. I can’t promise a satisfying ending though, it sort of just peters out.

Representative Paragraph

It’s a talking penis!

Well. Should’ve been it for Agent Windust. So it doesn’t help that that very night, or actually next morning just before dawn, she has a vivid, all-but-lucid dream about him, in which they are not exactly fucking, but fucking around, definitely. The details ooze away as dawn light and the sounds of garbage trucks and jackhammers grow in the room, till she’s left with a single image unwilling to fade, this federal penis, fierce red, predatory, and Maxine alone its prey. She has sought to escape but not sincerely enough for the penis, which is wearing some strange headgear, possibly a Harvard football helmet. It can read her thoughts. “Look at me, Maxine. Don’t look away. Look at me.” A talking penis. That same jive-ass radio-announcer voice.

Commentary

Here’s how Talitha Stevenson ends her Guardian review of Bleeding Edge:

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.

While her critique of the novel only generated a paltry nine comments, this was enough to get a snapshot of the divisiveness of Pynchon’s work. There were those who believe it’s about time that a reviewer pointed out Pynchon’s shortcomings, including his “unfunny sophomoric goofing” and those who see the clowning around as part and parcel of the package that is Pynchon.  In other words, you either get it or you don’t and those who don’t need not apply.

As a contrast, Jonathan Lethem’s review in the New York Times comes to terms with Pynchon’s humour, his paranoia and the slipperiness of his prose:

But wait. I’m acting as if we all know what it is to read Pynchon. In fact none of us do, for figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it. He’ll employ a string of citations to real and imaginary Bette Davis movies, say, or riffs on basketball, much as Pollock uses a color on a panoramic canvas or Coltrane a note in a solo: incessantly, arrestingly, yet seemingly without cumulative purpose. Instead, they’re threads for teasing at, or being teased by.

It’s not so much about getting a joke as admiring an author who’s playing to an audience of one, namely himself.

As someone coming to Pynchon for the first time I found myself having fond flashbacks to Infinite Jest. While there are no footnotes, Bleeding Edge has the same sense of literary chaos (some might call it post-modernism), consisting of long tangents (which are often moments where Pynchon gets to soap-box) word play (there are some terrible puns) and the promise of a convoluted plot that never actually delivers. Of course, recalling Infinite Jest is looking at this the wrong way around, as it was Foster Wallace who was, apparently, influenced by Pynchon’s early work.

Having said that, this novel is more than just an amalgamation of post-modern quirks and tics. In contrast to Stevenson who criticises Pynchon for his lack of intimacy, I see Maxine Tranow as not only anchoring the novel but providing it with its sense of humanity. She’s this beautiful mix of cynical world weariness and the Yiddishe Mama. I normally grind my teeth when novels and TV “Larry Charles” their Jewish characters, falling back on the neurotic and nebbish stereotype, but in this case – especially Maxine’s relationship with her parents and her children – there’s a real feeling of warmth and love.

Maxine’s investigation of Gabriel Ice and his shady dotcom is linked to the key event at the heart of this novel – the fall of the twin towers. It’s interesting that this is my second consecutive review where I’ve made reference to September 11. For Mary Costello, the tragedy is just another excuse to punish her character Tess (her son worked in the Twin Towers) for Pynchon, it’ an excuse to write, as Adam Kirsch aptly puts it, a “shaggy-dog story” of conspiracy theories and paranoia. There are moments when Pynchon seems to be siding with the view that September 11 was a false flag perpetuated by shady elements of the US Government. But the novel never commits. Is Pynchon poking fun at the conspiracy nuts? Or is this novel a knowing wink in their direction.

It’s hard for me to complain about Bleeding Edge‘s lack of a decent resolution given Pynchon never promised to provide one. But with the novelty worn off and the jokes starting to wear thin the last 100 or so pages are a bit of a slog. Still, there is enjoyment to be had here and while Pynchon might be a divisive writer, I don’t think Bleeding Edge is a divisive work.