Summary
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 ethicscarry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accountswithout having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working momtwo 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 neighborhoodtill 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."
Details
- Title Bleeding Edge
- Author Thomas Pynchon
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 496
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Penguin Press, New York
- Date 2013-09-17
- ISBN 9781594204234 / 1594204233
- Weight 1.72 lbs (0.78 kg)
- Dimensions 9.52 x 6.37 x 1.53 in (24.18 x 16.18 x 3.89 cm)
-
Themes
- Chronological Period: 21st Century
- Geographic Orientation: New York
- Locality: New York, N.Y.
- Sex & Gender: Feminine
- Library of Congress subjects Mystery fiction, New York (N.Y.)
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 2013017173
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Excerpt
It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school. Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks, it’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?
This morning, all up and down the streets, what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side has popped overnight into clusters of white pear blossoms. As Maxine watches, sunlight finds its way past rooflines and water tanks to the end of the block and into one particular tree, which all at once is filled with light.
Mom?” Ziggy in the usual hurry. Yo.”
Guys, check it out, that tree?”
Otis takes a minute to look. Awesome, Mom.”
Doesn’t suck,” Zig agrees. The boys keep going, Maxine regards the tree half a minute more before catching up. At the corner, by reflex, she drifts into a pick so as to stay between them and any driver whose idea of sport is to come around the corner and run you over.
Sunlight reflected from east-facing apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of buildings across the street. Two-part buses, new on the routes, creep the crosstown blocks like giant insects. Steel shutters are being rolled up, early trucks are double-parking, guys are out with hoses cleaning off their piece of sidewalk. Unsheltered people sleep in doorways, scavengers with huge plastic sacks full of empty beer and soda cans head for the markets to cash them in, work crews wait in front of buildings for the super to show up. Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies. Kids, parents, and nannies wheeled and afoot are heading in all different directions for schools in the neighborhood. Half the kids seem to be on new Razor scooters, so to the list of things to keep alert for add ambush by rolling aluminum.
Media reviews
Citations
- Booklist, 09/15/2013, Page 33
- Books & Culture, 01/01/2014, Page 19
- Entertainment Weekly, 12/27/2013, Page 94
- Kirkus Best Fiction, 11/15/2013, Page 32
- Kirkus Reviews, 09/01/2013, Page 21
- Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview, 08/15/2013, Page 5
- Library Journal, 09/01/2013, Page 103
- LJ Top 10 Book, 12/01/2013, Page 27
- New York Review of Books, 11/07/2013, Page 68
- New York Times Book Review, 09/22/3013, Page 30
- New Yorker (The), 09/23/2013, Page 115
- NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 12/08/2013, Page 26
- Publishers Weekly, 08/19/2013, Page 0
- Publishers Weekly Best Books, 11/04/2013, Page 24
- Shelf Awareness, 09/27/2013, Page 0
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