The Bleeding Edge: Thomas Pynchon: A Review: We get it

Ok, Pynchon. We get it. You kept busy in the early 2000's watching anime and playing video games with your grandsons. Also sitcoms, there are more Friends references than a novel should be allowed to have.

Maxine Tarnow, the detective/heroine of the story, acts as erratically as there are cringey puns in a Pynchon novel, and I’d accuse him of misogyny if his male characters didn't also act as idiotically. They're all one-dimensional and forgettable. The plot lacks the necessary build up and climax that a detective novel is supposed to have, resulting in an insignificant resolution at the end. A stranger to Pynchon's work could be upset over the non-conventional structure, but we all know that with him it’s always about the ride. And what a docile ride it is. The prose is flat. There is no tension. The words are not as carefully chosen and the digressions often lead to a dead-end.  The paranoia is still there, and how could it not when we're talking about 9/11 and the Internet?

The story is told in the present tense so there is minimal foreshadowing, and when 9/11 happens, at about 2/3 of the novel, in the immediacy of the now, there is no time for analyzing. We are caught right in the middle of all the confusion and the way to cope is to not overthink it. In a sense that’s what Bleeding Edge is all about, the digressions that go nowhere, sudden changes in voice and literary genre, ambiguity, irony, name-dropping, puns and silly names to entertain us, to distract us from the confusion, to take us somewhere else, like DeepArcher, the virtual reality simulation that by the end of the novel has expanded its real estate to include pre-9/11 architecture. The only moment Pynchon drops all artifices is during a heartfelt half-page eulogy to firefighters, and for that brief moment Pynchon is at his rarest with unequivocal honesty.


After David Foster Wallace and the new sincerity movement that brought to the forefront the likes of Tao Lin and Marie Calloway, pouring their hearts out into heavily auto-biographical fiction, writing in a style deliberately unadorned and non-ambiguous, Pynchon, with his  cryptic prose, represents, for better or worse, one of the last outposts of irony resistance. And on Bleeding Edge he is strongly standing his ground, like an old ethnic lady that for decades has been living in a rent-controlled unit on a now heavily gentrified neighborhood.