By Tymon Smith for The Sunday Times
Bleeding Edge
Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape)
*****
How to explain to someone who’s never had the experience, what it is to read a Thomas Pynchon novel? What happens in the almost 800 pages of 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow between the classic opening, “A screaming comes across the sky”, and the final descent of a V2 rocket on London at the end? As with Joyce, reading Pynchon for the sake of it is as much the point as learning what actually happens to his characters between the first and final pages of their lives.
He demands more of his readers than any of his contemporaries and with Bleeding Edge his fans will feel the familiar stepping into the Pynchonesque hall of mirrors, full of too-clever jokes, pop culture references and the certainty that everything will implode at some point, leaving them satisfactorily dizzy like children stepping off a carnival ride. It’s a feeling the fans have found lacking in some of his recent work – but they can rest assured that at age 76 he still has a unique ability to delight, perplex, enrage and entertain.
The plot of Bleeding Edge centres on an investigation by struck-off-the-roll fraud investigator and New York Upper West Side mom Maxine Tarnow – the most down-to-earth and pleasant Pynchon narrator yet – into the pre 9/11 activities of a computer-security firm and its billionaire CEO. Maxine is the lens through which Pynchon takes the reader on a hyper-real journey through the New York of 2001 just before the big event that changed the world – changed it so completely that those of us who were never in Manhattan at the time have only vague memories from movies and television to remind us of what it was like before.
We’re at the pointy end of the first dot.com bubble. In just under 500 pages Pynchon unrolls everything from the way that Silicon Alley – the area where the tech companies roosted – changed the way people spoke to the way New Yorkers fantasized, interacted and came to rely on the escape offered by the virtual world. Maxine’s journey takes her to the Deep Web and its proto-Second Life virtual world, DeepArcher, where things get more and more complicated as the spirals of a Pynchon plot demand.
It’s The Matrix on methamphetamines with a hit of laughing gas thrown in. There’s a vitality to Pynchon’s playfulness and joke telling that keeps you smiling through most of it even when the references become too colloquial for non-New Yorkers, and the pop-culture references too many to keep up with without constant resort to Google. From the opening in which Maxine drops her sons off at school to the end where she does it again, post-9/11 – what happens in Bleeding Edge? Like a good acid trip it could change the way you view the world.
- Tymon Smith @tymonsmith
Book details
- Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
EAN: 9781594204234
Find this book with BOOK Finder!