The
Washington Post
Brilliantly
written a joy to read Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally
wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does
best.” (Michael Dirda)
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?
Slate.com
"If
not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding
Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity,
you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed a
necessary novel and one
that literary history has been waiting for."
The New
York Times Book Review
Exemplary
dazzling and ludicrous... Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel
should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight.” (Jonathan Lethem)
Wired
magazine
The book’s
real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a
continuation of the same tensions between
freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos through which he has framed the last half-century."
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