Thomas Pynchon

An average mother of two working in investigation fraud gets drawn into a shady and eccentric underworld after looking into the finances of a billionaire computer geek in this new novel from the author of V and Gravity's Rainbow.

Bleeding Edge

Nick Whalen

Finally, a noir tale that gives me nostalgia.

jack

really funny, thought-provoking, and all around wonderful. loses steam around page 400 and doesn’t really pick it up again until the last 20 pages. other than that this book was great.

Vladimir

както пее Карли Саймън: nobody does it better, makes me feel sad for the rest

от текста за Сборище на трубадури:

Това, което извършва атаката от 9/11 в книгата, е да маркира най-важното размножаване на световете – една от „майките“ на вече споменатия двойник. Новия свят, обсебен от сигурността, внимателното наблюдение с изцяло чисти намерения, следенето. Свят, в който има повече място за затвори, където Интернет е прекрасен и чист, безопасен и политически коректен, не океан с дълбини, а мрежа с приятели и онлайн магазини. Светът, в който Пинчън не вижда място за иронията. Вече всичко трябва да е буквално, казва една от героините. (Въпроси за по-късно: как се случва изкуството на такова място и дали Bleeding Edge не е последният възможен роман на Пинчън?)

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom 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 licence 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 mum - 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 neighbourhood - 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 Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling 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?

Melody Izard

For april

Arggh! I failed at my first Pynchon read. Could not finish Vineland. I feel pressured to love this book. Not pressured by anyone except myself. Are his characters too screwball for me? I'm standing way over in the corner pretending to send a text message while I listen to and observe carefully Maxine and Fiona and all the rest of these people trying to hear what they've got to say and trying to give a shit.

After completing:

This is what it felt like:
I'd read along and suddenly be totally confused about who these characters are and how in the heck we got here. Kind of like if I was riding along in the backseat texting my running group instead of paying attention to the conversation. Then suddenly something would catch my attention and it would be the most masterly crafted bit of conversation I had ever heard. But soon I was back to playing spider of just loosing myself in the hum of the outside world. 

It's a herky-jerky ride with the authors pride in himself for learning about "technology" leaking through the story line and stinking up the joint. 

Awwww. I just read back and I really don't mean to be so hard on the book. But it will be hard to pick up another Pynchon.

Daryl Houston

This is maybe the most accessible longish Pynchon yet. It's sort of a cross between Delillo's Cosmopolis and Pynchon's own Inherent Vice with less of what's meh about those two books and a tad of Show Crash thrown in for good measure. There's enough of Pynchon in the book to make it unmistakably Pynchon, but he's tempered his tics enough here that it seldom becomes infuriating. I more or less enjoyed it all the way through, which is saying a lot, as I tend to take Pynchon like bad medicine. It's definitely worth a read if you're into Pynchon or are Pynchon-curious.

Bleeding Edge

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