Bleeding Edge: A Novel

I've been longing for Pynchon's take on the internet. Wonderful and worth the wait. All of his trademarks are here - paranoia, delightful wordplay, onomastic cheekiness, esoteric subjects combined with pop culture. And, something Pynchon knows how to do better than any writer, living or dead, an ending that leaves you with a sense of fulfillment. For all of you who ignorantly feel the need to review the voice on the audio version here, please go back and retract your comments and ratings. This isn't the forum for that.

It's not Gravity rainbow but it has some sublime moments, a few laugh out loud sections and a normal coda section. Worth the read although. It did drag in sections and is perhaps the least ambitious book by Pynchon.

The silly puns, the crazy song lyrics, the wacky made-up movies. An attempt to be reconciling personal paranoia with the reality of being part of a family. It seems to me that Pynchon wrote this for himself. If so, I am glad he shared it with us.

interesting story that uses the dot.com boom plus NYC and Sept. 11 and bust to underscore a lot of issues that are relevant today. a lot of laugh out loud play on words just to keep in the spirt of the tale ;-)

Reading this book is like this: You're in the back seat of a car. Whomever is driving won't tell you where you're going and is a wild driver. You can only look out the side windows, so you can't see where you're going. Sometimes you see something that looks familiar, then it's gone; you try to figure out where you're going and you think you have an idea. Then the driver starts swerving and skidding and you're holding on and looking out the side window and nothing looks familiar but it's kind of cool in its confusion and you decide that although this is not like any other ride you've been on, you're on it until the end.

great use of language. well written and hugely entertaining. but the journey was much more than the destination. at its conclusion, I wondered if I had missed something as nothing seemed "finished." of course, that can be a good thing. but for me, not a great thing. still...worth ones time invested reading it.

"Bleeding Edge" is the most rollicking novel I've read since "Reamde." My first exposure to Pynchon was "Gravity's Rainbow." I was just coming out of college, and I was so happy that the tradition of "Tristram Shandy" was still alive, humor and erudition and riffs.

Pynchon's writing can often be intriguing and usually unique, but a good editor could have taken a machete to the dialogue in this one without losing anything of value in theme, characterization or story. The deep dive into the "Deep Web" in search of the "Deep Archer" has interesting moments, and some insights into the dysutopia of the internet gone way wrong and used for the most nefarious of purposes, as well as just mindless gratification. But there wasn't a single likable character (maybe that was intentional?), and the seedy and unsavory characters and their escapades soon got, well, less than interesting.

Pynchon's Maxine has it all, bleeding edge life-style funded by shady operations; kids smarter than her; a mate who treats her like a casual hobby, an omnisexual, fickle, quarelling entourage; deadbeats, thieves and thugs for clients; a game world escape habit; menstrual jewish agoniste; a pair of loaded pistols; a brilliant black executive aide; mezmerizing orgasms offset by despicable abuse; imaginary walking and talking dead; time travel; inescapable cyber machinations of spying, cheating, lying, stealing; horrors before and after 9/11; here it is, what it's like to be a woman in New York City over 10 years or so, nothing like the promises of women's mags, shades of grey, TV tormenta, celeb gossip, no, none of that except as background static which barely registers on Maxine's crowd of narcissists, superegos, druggies, bandits, extortionists, killers, white shoe sharks, and their victims, Maxine solacing and doctoring the wounded and bear-trapped, running a skull- hidden kaleidescope of reflections, fears, judgments, forgets and forgives, puns, jokes, insults, helpless heapful love of her boys and their in and out dad.

Infusing Maxine's many tribulations and few joys, is the vain and vulgar cyberworld which gets a savage beating by Pynchon's ridicule of sustained assault. But that's only one of his worthy targets of pretense, vainglory and greed. Between the Upper West Side and Silicon Alley there lies the blood spurting from his slashings of bold name fashionistas, edgyists, slick artists, slimey investors, corrupt cryptographers, reptilian developers, the perps are arrayed, ID'd, transparentized by Pynchon's panopticon, Maxine.

i love his stuff but this stuff is a little more than i can handle. but i think it is my complete disinterest in the society this pictures with great fun and a romp and all of what you would expect from the author..but i had to rush through it cause it's about as interesting to me as the inner workings of a rock band even pynchon can't help me there..

NY NY as Pynchon bats it about in the very real and highly suspected but not yet verifiable all encompassing miasma of the discerning mind with a light touch of The Event.
Impact total, but exhausting for a seeker of Truth, you will know you’ve been There but it’s all so elusive; and I can’t recall seeing that movie or the other – well doesn’t matter. Read on no regrets.

This is a wild look back at early 2001, complete with rumors, myths, dotcom crazy, Russian thugs, shopping at Loehmann's and soooo much more. It did make my gut clench as 11 September (that's how he refers to it) approached, but that part of the story was handled well. Take you time and savor the read.

Pynchon having so much fun with writing and his reader. This is a great break from the daily stress - classic NYC escapades and thoughts, and as often from Pynchon a time capsule, in 14 pt. font size, of a period in American society.

if you like pynchon, and not everyone does, you will like this. similar to blue jasmine, the new woody allen film. not for everyone the way midnight in paris was.. same thing here.. not approachable to everyone like inherent vice.. but good!

-kris

There seems to be two Pynchons, the literary experimentalist of Gravitys Rainbow, or Mason & Dixon, and the hipster thriller mystery writer of Bleeding Edge, or Vineland. I like this Pynchon better.

This is my first book by Thomas Pynchon... where the hell have I been all these years? The novel is brilliant... a must read, though not always an easy one. Funny, crazy, frightening, a post modern whacked out of a thing, but definitely worth reading. I loved it!

The book requires a little work on the part of the reader, and a smattering of knowledge about the history of the FBI from the 60s and 70s, but all together it it is just cynical enough to ring true and getting past ones old fashionedness, it has some flashes of brilliance.

Pynchon is back. The enigmatic, shaded-from-the-spy-eye of the media figure returns to the city where he started his career, NY, NY. The city he has not set his type or typeset to, nor penned literary streets of, since V. The question is how does this new work compare with the rest of his canon.
The answer: it probably sits somewhere in the middle. It above Vineland and Inherent Vice. Weather or not it reaches up against "Against The Day," is debatable.
It certainly does not reach the height's of insight and warmth of "Mason and Dixon," nor does it is achieve the pinnacle of achievement of "Gravities Rainbow." The mystery and characterization are a far cry from "Crying lot of 49," nor is it, nor will it be as memorable.
This does not mean it is a bad book, far from it. It shows amazing insight into turn of the 21st century pop culture: parents collecting beanie babies for college tuition funds, geekie, tech-obsessed Russian rap artists traveling in stretch limos, 911 conspiracy nuts, and digital paranoia. It weaves in and out of virtual space with virtuoso. It also contains all the goofs, conspiracy and hijinks of the Pynchon brand.
Any fan of the author will not be disappointed with the 21st century Pynchonesque world conveyed within the work. They should pick up a copy. If nothing else, to add to the shelf of they're other Pynchon favorites - possibly set next to his 2009, hippie-noir "Inherent Vice."
Plus, the story of Maxine's search and uncovering of Gabriel Ice's plot is intriguing and reminiscent of their favorite portions "Crying lot of 49," which work the book most closely resembles, in comparison to the rest of his works. The description of Ground Zero and those involved in the rescue, recovery and rubble removal is also a treasure that measures up with passages from his classic contributions to the American canon. I would encourage any post-modern literature lover or lover of mysteries to pick it up as well, especially if they are not familiar with the rest of the authors work, though I would recommend they pick up "Crying Lot of 49," first. It is the classic and still the best introduction to the author's work. It is also the shortest - clocking in at a little over 200 pages, depending on the edition. Once the finish that book, this book should be their next grab. Then they should, I hope, go on to experience the rest of the work of this modern American classic author.

Funny, clever, and clearly reflecting the time. Some of the best sentences ever written.
I know the Upper West Side, I know the South Bay in LA having grown up there, and I know tech having worked there for 30 years. All accurately rendered in words here.

His breadth of knowledge speaks of amazing experience and retention. The result is a prose too pungent to take and barely understandable by an average (?) reader like me. The plot and characterizations become too subservient to hold my interest but I am forcing myself to read it through so as not miss the scattered gems that bring me abruptly alert and respectful. Not for the casual reader. My apologies to those smart enough to be his true fans.

M. P. Feldman

This book is probably well written if I could understand it. It is an intrigue story about the web and fraud. But it is written in a slang language such as sez for says. The story may be good but all the technical references and the slang make it very hard to follow. I figure it must be my age (65) as I am fairly computer literate. Also there are an abundance of characters that keep popping up rather infrequently which also makes for confusion.

I'm not ready for a gritty, NYC Pynchon I'm a "Crying of Lot," V kind of
F guy, I guess. Last Pynchon I read was somewhere in the first 100 pages of "Gravity's,," in maybe '79. Just downloaded a sample of that one, to give it another stab.

If this were a book from a new writer I'd just discovered, I'd give it a higher rating. It's a good book, fun to read. I'm sure it's unfair of me to hope for another "Against the Day" or "Gravity's Rainbow." The man is getting older, so maybe we're lucky to get any new books from him. I'll continue to purchase any and every new work from Pynchon, but having bought this one after months of eager anticipation, this was a bit of a let-down.

This was my first experience with Thomas Pynchon and I think he writes for his own amusement and the reader be damned. I thought his internal dialogue annoying and exclusive to the reader and ultimately I wondered "what is the point" - the book left me cold. I realize I am in the minority and the world considers him one of the greats but I don't know why.

While I like some of Pynchon's other novels (V, Gravity's Rainbow), I found this one to be really slow and hard to get into. I didn't empathize with many (any?) of the characters. I had a hard time following it, at times, and I had a hard time caring, when I did. I had read several reviews of this book that said it was mediocre, but wanted to give it a fair chance. Turns out the reviews I read were all pretty much spot on.

The creative writing style kept me reading, but the storyline did not keep me engaged. The characters were shallow and didn't inspire empathy or any other emotion. Periodic fun dialogue was not enough to offset the drudgery of slogging through to the ending, which fizzled out and didn't even leave me thinking.

Bleeding Edge is very hard to read.
but i will persist, finish it and re-rate it.
If i can finish it, i expect that i will like it a lot.
but tough going.

How does Pynchon get away with this shit?
maybe because reader views it not as an entertainment but an education?

UPDATE: now 15% in to it on the reread.
rereading the beginning put me on track...
so that i now know central characters and concept.
This is crucial and i will now be able to carry through.
(rereading on kindle vs print also important.)

Onward !!!!!!!!!

update:

Bleeding Edge done.

now ready, 30+ years(?) later, to take another whack a GV (Gravity's Rainbow).

(but first off to the library to pick up a copy of V, which i remember reading back then, but don't remember much about it, now, except that, at the time, being very impressed ....but i was easily impressed in those days, eh?)

A new copy of GV is now loaded on my Kindle.....

I do find it easier to muddle through these impossible classics digitally. Digitally, I may even be up to Ulysses, or god forbid, Marcel Proust, whose collection unread stares down at me of from a bookshelf of my Abaco beach house.

actually, i'm more impressed with my getting thru BE than the book itself.
i feel this way about almost all of P's later books but i keep buying and reading him.

after finishing, i changed my rating from 3 to 4 stars.

Although I haven't finished reading this novel just yet, and am reading this along with Gravity's Rainbow simultaneously, I'm pleased with it. Pynchon's books don't scare me so I am planning to purchase all of his novels and read them all at once. I'm so glad I bought Bleeding Edge, the dust-jacket is so trippy, it changes colors in the light, and sort of has this 3-d illusion feel to it which I love.

this was the first time I read this author, as his previous books had good reviews and this book's plot sounded interesting. the writing was incoherent, the computer knowledge was embarrassing and the characters made no sense. it was a lot of words and confusion. a mess.

Pynchon's writing has become cloying and, often, irritating. It's as though he thinks every sentence, every conversation has to be interesting. His writing these days gives me the sense of someone trying too hard, desperate for approval. I give it 3 stars because it is Pynchon so there's great stuff buried under the cuteness, but I wish he'd slim down, write a slender, direct little novel without all the flourishes.

this is an audio book and I can't stand the voice of the reader. I can't continue to listen even though I think I could appreciate the book.
the writing is dense and would probably be best read and not listened to.

This book had no consistency to it . It jumped all over the place and really didn't make a lot of sense at times. I can see some of the theories he was making but the story line just rambled and just all over the place.

The return of Thomas Pynchon, much heralded, unnecessary. This is an ordinary book that attempts to take us into the high-tech world while taking us deep into the bowels of computer games, programs. With ordinary people writing programs, greedy market manipulators using them, the author provides the basic evil mystery man of wealth but little rationale for his behavior.

Nothing new here.

I enjoyed "Gravity's Rainbow", it being the only other Pynchon book I've read, and so don't consider myself a Pynchon groupie.

Bleeding Edge bombards you immediately with pseudo-tech slang, that, if you know anything about technology, comes off as completely forced and affected. The language and terms (mis)used in the first 50 pages turned me off to the book and I haven't picked it up since. Very "meh".

Like many others, I talk about reading Pynchon like he's a hard drug. "Yeah, I've done Pynchon a couple times. It hits you hard, man, digs it's teeth in real deep and doesn't let go. You start to wander, you lose focus, you wake up and an inordinate amount of time has gone by, you focus again, push through the haze, the smoke, the silliness, and there at the center there might just be something worthwhile. Or it might just be a gag. So yeah, I've done Pynchon."

"Bleeding Edge" the 2013 novel by Mr. Pynchon is no exception. It starts with the backbone of a detective novel: Maxine, our certified fraud investigator/protagonist, begins looking into the financials of cutting edge internet firm hashslingerz and its billionaire CEO Gabriel Ice in the spring of 2001. The dotcom bubble has burst and an eerie quiet surrounds the Internet world. Inevitably, in your mind, a clock is ticking as Maxine marches towards September 11th. The more she looks she finds transfers to Middle Eastern banks, mysterious payments to failing start ups, and a whole number of (kinda) suspicious activities.

From there the plot careens about in classic Pynchon fashion. A body appears. Characters enter Maxine's life, explain things before you realize who they are, and then travel on. Maxine sees more people she recognizes on the streets of Manhattan than anyone in the history of Manhattan. Important clues are delivered by mail to Maxine because sure, why not. Pileups of coincidences clog the plot line. Maxine inexplicably falls for a CIA bagman, decides the only way to survey a strip club is from the pole, and bounces around Manhattan talking to people who dislike Gabriel Ice. Who, while I hate to sound like Johnnie Cochran, really has done nothing wrong. I mean, he's a ruthless web entrepreneur and a philanderer (every Pynchon character is), but other than that his only crime is routing money suspiciously to Middle Eastern banks?

Other things to know about Pynchon: there is usually a fair amount of paranoia and "hey look this mysterious corporation is popping up with it's tentacles in everything!" People have silly names, to the point where it is annoying and not funny. Paragraphs run on, trail into digressions or backstories, jump back quickly to other characters, and frequently devolve into hijinks and/or unfunny songs.* Every now and then Pynchon will spin a miraculous phrase or paragraph and description and you will shake your head and say "man that's some good Pynchon."

Pynchon stands out for being known for the postwar mentality that peeling back the onion layers of life didn't lead to much, and actually it's pretty silly after all. His novels are the same way. To me it always seems like the conspiracy theorist's nagging hope is that there is someone behind the curtain, pulling the strings, because that would mean that there is a framework behind the world, there is a level of control, and that everything happening out here isn't all senseless randomness. All these clues Maxine finds add up to ... well not much. Just like life. I guess.

Having read four Pynchon novels (Gravity's Rainbow, V, Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice) this is probably the most readable. The POV shifts are more easier to follow, the chapters shorter, the run-ons less mind numbing. It is set in the almost present day, so the inside jokes are more recognizable. However, I think the familiarity is what irritates me the most. A 9/11 conspiracy is grafted to the plot as poorly as the surgery from "Human Centipede." Characters bemoan yuppie antics, use the phrase "late capitalism" a dozen times at least, feel angsty on 9/8/01 for "...an epoch whose end they've been celebrating all night," and wonder whether 9/11 might be the end of a long American summer. Pynchon's antics and word play are fun and all, but am I any wiser for reading this? Philosophically challenged? Entertained? The only moral I gather is to keep your family close is a chaotic world and to not trust anything - especially not the Internet, which, as Maxine's lecture spouting father reminds us, was a DARPA project during the Cold War. You look close enough, you can find a conspiracy anywhere.

In Pynchon's first novel "V." the Whole Sick Crew (a band of 1950's bohemians) discuss yo - yos: traveling somewhere where the travel time is longer than the time spent at the destination. They joke about flying down to Puerto Rico for an abortion and flying right back, or riding the subway downtown just to turnaround and take it back to Harlem. "Bleeding Edge" and all Pynchon novels are yo-yos. The plots and novels spin down, hesitate, but always return to where they started. It might be a fun ride, but it doesn't take you anywhere ultimately. This belief was reinforced while reading "Bleeding Edge" as the pages disappeared and no conclusion was in sight. As dawn breaks across Manhattan at Maxine's diner the nocturnal patrons are filing out. Some have found what they "...thought they needed, coffee, a cheeseburger, a kind word." Others "...nodded off and missed it once again."

Pynchon, man. Missed it once again.

*Note: I am probably a bad judge of this. I have never, ever laughed at a song written in a book.

Pynchon's usual pyrotechnics cannot rescue an unusually aimless plot. The cast of characters is muddled and ultimately uninteresting. The techno background is not profoundly accurate, instead it seems to me a lot of technobabble rot.

I'm not sure where he wanted to go, but I'm sure he never arrived.

I foundt the author to be too deeply invested in making this a story only the most educated student in cyber technology could understand. Coupled with the number of characters one is supposed to remember, for me, the story was totally lost.

I fell in love with my wife having not even cut the pages, nor broken the Hymen of her yet closed cover. With bleeding edge, she had at least opened herself to me and let me into her first chapter before my heart broke open. Still leaning into against the day, which sits like stacked like cord wood of totemic displays beneath P's latest addition to the family (his and ours), I know I am not worthy to comment on any of Tom's creations. But my shoulder is engaged and I push on in the quiet contentedness of promethius as he goes about his daily labors, (he may thank the gods for union breaks and job security, I for the many annotators who make my own trudging bearable and thus a joy). Add another joy to my life. Thanks my friend. I love you. Thank you.

I have read all of Pynchon. First I found Inherent Vice and now Bleeding Edge to be shockingly disappointing after masterpieces like Gravity's Rainbow and Crying of Lot 49. Just a couple bad Pulp Fictions. Maybe I came to expect too much from Pynchon.

Thomas Pynchon could be the most overrated author ever. I have not been able to finish most of his books, and for those I finish such as "Bleeding Edge" I have to wonder what the fuss is all about. He has never created a character that could possibly exist in the real world and has no sensitivity to the human condition.

This book was nothing more than an unending series of pretentious one-liners. I read 50 pages, realized that I didn't have the slightest idea what the book as about, and started over. When I got back up to 50 pages, I realized I was not having a good time, so I stopped.

Oh, man, what a disappointment. Inherent Vice was accurately dismissed as 'Pynchon Lite'; Bleeding Edge can be disregarded as Virtual Pynchon: looks like the real thing but has no soul. All of his trademark elements - paranoia, wacky names, conspiracies and subconspiracies, acronyms, lefty politics, drug use - are present in spades. What's missing are compelling characters, a narrative, a purpose, something to say. What's worse, this is an incredibly unfunny book. Pynchon seems more interested in demonstrating how hip he still is (do we really want grandpa name-checking Bad Brains and the Bunnymen?) than developing a plot. Pynchon's heroes and villains are always cartoonish, but in this novel the schtick-factor is relentlessly tiresome. Nearly every sentence of dialogue is meant to be a punch line. The characters, regardless of sex or age, all sound alike, dropping unhilarious bugs bunnyisms in the exact same voice. Instead of getting on with the story, Pynchon simply adds new boring characters with each chapter, until the book is crammed with wise-crackin' geeks, freaks and sneaks, none of whom have anything to say. What comes through most strongly is Pynchon's glowering contempt - for modern NYC, the government, techno-society - basically everything. It's upsetting, and a bit insulting for his readers, for this author to waste his gifts on what is essentially a lengthy hate letter disguised as a 'comedic' detective story.

It is interesting how authors of Pynchon's vintage, say Roth, DeLillo, Barth, are unable to write from a woman's perspective. The book's protagonist, Maxine, is basically a middle-aged NY yenta version of Doc Sportello or Zoyd Wheeler. None of the characters are supposed to be realistic, but if I was a woman I might be pretty offended at how one-dimensionally Pynchon's female characters are presented. Actually, the whole cast of Bleeding Edge is lame and unlikeable, but it's especially noticeable with the women that populate the book.

Why do I rate Bleeding Edge two stars when it's such a dud? Because Pynchon can still write rings around anyone else when he feels like it. Note that many of the readers who rated the book 3 stars also called it 'disappointing', 'not so great' and 'a let down' or observed that it 'falls flat'. (In fact, nearly all of the 3 star reviews are more critical than this one.) Occasionally he'll serve up some terrific paragraphs that remind you of what he is or was capable of. It's not a bad book; it's a bad Pynchon book. You can't really compare him to anyone else. For those readers that are unfamiliar with this author's works, do yourself a favor and read everything he wrote through Mason & Dixon. (Maybe take on Against the Day, too, if you're in prison for a while.) Pynchon is a brilliant author and his previous work is among the best of the last 50 years. A bit challenging at times, sometimes very challenging, but usually worth it, until now. Bleeding Edge is simply an okay novel that Pynchon phoned-in, for lack of a better expression. I tried like hell to like this book but it just never delivered.

Characters: Everybody's just sooooo ironic...and precious.

The Dialogue: Too cutsy...terminally suffers from techy literati insider-itis

The Plot: Other than the superficial contrivances...still looking...tragically flawed.

Mr. P. must be sensing his mortality...self-consciously clever...trying waaaay too hard (to leave a legacy?)...a constant aura of the expectant, I'd say desperate, author hovering in the wings waiting to see if the audience gets his brilliance and erudite humor...

Sad really...like the old ballplayer who played a few seasons past his prime...

The story plods without those soaring brilliant periodic sentences.
and astonishing twists of plot that enliven V, Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day.
But should even faithful readers criticize the master?

I must of missed something with this book! Found it very hard to follow & read.
Wish I had of taken my first instinct and stopped reading it earlier!!
Got to the end with a struggle, still not sure what it was about!!!!

It is circa 2001, and Thomas Pynchon is not going to tell us the story in any straight forward fashion either. Maxine runs a fraud investigating agency called Tail 'Em and Nail 'Em. As we follow Maxine we encounter that borderline fantasy of the real world in which Pynchon excels. She is a Jewish mother preoccupied with her family and submerged in the burgeoning world of the birth of potentially sentient computers. Google has not yet gone public and Microsoft rules the home computer. Of course there is a murder, and there are labyrinthine paths to its solution.

This plot is intriguing to the point of enmeshment, although not necessarily in the customary linear fashion. To be cliched, the voyage is the vital component. For me the enchantment is Maxine and her familiar but so esoteric world. And do not forget the language. The almost throw away bursts of brilliant commentary are a treat for any lover of the written world. The school which her son attends is based on a theory in which"each grade level would be regarded as a different kind of mental condition and managed accordingly. A loony bin with homework, basically." I have to love that paragraph, and Pynchon's book overflows with them.

This is a book lover's dream; a dance with plot and syntax that I am so pleased to have read.

I am actually reading the book on KIndle now, and I like it a lot. Regrettably, the Audible recording is horrible. The person sounds old and lacks emotion. Her voice just doesn't fit the book. I can recommend the book and author, but not the Audible recording.

Our entire book club disliked this book---nobody finished it. We are fans of mindless reads; not exactly academics when it comes to leisure reading. So, this review comes from a group that isn't easily disappointed. The book introduces the main character as this soccer-mom by day, private investigator attorney by night kind of role and then quickly moves in to a random phone call from a seedy informant and jumps from point to point. This book is disjointed, doesn't set the plot well, and the writing itself is terrible. I respect that the reading experience is subjective, but cannot understand how this book received so many positive reviews.

OK, I'll do the best I can here. I'm going to give you the basic idea of this book, then I'm going to tell you the good things and bad things about it, then I'm going to try to sum up my thoughts and feelings about this book, and it's author, in general.

The plot of the book revolves around two central characters, Maxine Loeffler, a fraud investigator, and Gabriel Ice, a dot - com billionaire. Through a tipster, Maxine discovers that Ice is running a shady internet site, Hashslingrz, and that he is diverting millions of dollars from his 'business' to nefarious entities in the Middle East. The book follows the investigation, where we meet numerous characters connected to either, or both, Maxine and Ice -- many of them off beat and unusual (it's Pynchon, after all). And perhaps none more remarkable than the amazing Conkling Speedwell, the first (and no doubt only) Forensic Nose. We follow Maxine as she investigates Ice, during the course of which she dives into the Deep Web, finds two people she knew murdered, uncovers -- but never truly reveals -- a conspiracy plot for 9/11, makes friends with several Russians of dubious past, wonders why a Mossad agent is in New York, all the time trying to figure out just what Ice is up to. When she does......well, that's for you to read. Before that, though, Maxine spends a lot of time eating, eating, eating (it's amazing how much dialog of this book takes place over food). That, and watching some very cool old movies with her father.

This is a very well written book by a man who knows his craft well. The writing is, at many times, eccentric and delightful. His central characters are well thought out : nuanced and detailed, and the scenes he paints for us are lush with the vitality of life. Pynchon writes with a stream of consciousness style that blurs the beginning, the middle, and the end. That, I'm afraid, is where is trouble starts. Because, for all the wonderful writing, the plot is somewhat obscure and the book is hard to follow from start to finish. Note to reader : you have to PAY ATTENTION and you can't put this book down too long in - between reading. But anyway, many times this book seems more like a fictional essay rather than a novel. I'll try to explain : most readers of fiction like a novel to have a well - defined beginning, middle, and end. With this book (and this is typical of Pynchon), he blurs the lines. You have to really pay attention to know really where you are in this book. Also, in my reading, there are too many meaningless details that could have easily been omitted without hurting the story. Another irritation : there's at least one subplot that goes nowhere -- and that's disappointing because the lead - up to it makes you think it will go somewhere. And finally, there's the ending. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, I'll just tell you not to expect a gang - bang resolution. Remember what I said earlier? How he blurs the lines? Well, it's almost like Pynchon ended this book in the middle of the story.

Thomas Pynchon, what can you say about this guy? Not much, he's so mysterious. Never allows his picture to be taken. Never allows interviews. No one exactly sure where he lives. His Wikipedia page is just short of a joke. But you can say one thing : he's one hell of a writer. Despite his obscure plots, his off - beat characters, not following the rules, and endings that can make one shake their head, he's very much worth reading. Can I recommend this book? Yes, provided that you don't mind being pushed a little (sometimes a lot). The book is not totally satisfying, but it is thoroughly enjoyable. Thank you for reading my 2 cents on this fine book!

This is the most strained effort to write a hip novel I've encountered. Clearly it is written for a tiny clique of sophisticated New Yorkers, but it has so many obscure references that even heroine Maxine's Upper West Side neighbors would be flumoxed trying to get it. The low life characters, the quickie sex that even the heroine indulges and the shallow plot make fighting through the language simply not worth the effort. How this book earned a nomination for a National Book Award is beyond me. My book club agreed to read it at my urging. Now every member has thrown it out and my credibility is shot.

Pynchon’s 9/11 novel seemed to me to have a touch of amazing reality and striking satire and brutal awareness of the years leading up to the event, rather than the event itself. As a matter of fact, I would almost compare the reception and reviews of this book that I read to those of Foer’s Extremely Loud, where Foer wrote a book about communication and how we are who we are because of everyone that came before us, but was been distilled by critics to nothing more than a 9/11 novel - which hardly does any justice to the brilliance of both Foer’s and Pynchon’s book.

I really enjoyed this novel - a novel that reconstructs the age of awe and silicon awakening with an accuracy that seemed to mirror the perpetual excesses and anxiety of the age of the gilded information highway. The characters continue to be the classic Pynchonians, riddled with social, governmental, and societal anxiety, swimming through the circumstantial quagmires of modern American life. In this piece, they breathe electricity, their bodies little communal ants in the machine of the dot-com spectacle. We watch as their identities and livelihoods are snatched from them in the fashion that we can see coming from a mile away, and we would believe this to be a blade-runner alternate future of excess and violence were it not set in the past that we all lived through ourselves.

Perhaps what I found to be the most remarkable is that, as a man who likely missed everything that this book is about at his age when he experienced the events and time that the book takes place, he has created an incredibly accurate and brilliant book about what it was like living at the turn of the millennium. I was personally in my prime as these events transpired, studying computer science in college and building the knowledge base and navigating the sludge of tech companies. To me, it is shocking that this man (who was in his sixties as these events happened) has made such a clear avatar of the age. Really. I remember giving lessons on how to connect to AOL and send an email to people his age, and yet Pynchon has brilliantly reconstructed a world that I was able to revisit with both awe, admiration, and disgust.

That said, it is not Gravity’s Rainbow.

It is a regular-style literature that isn’t low enough to be pop, but very similar to the madhouse Inherent Vice. I loved it, but in the perspective of some of his earlier brilliant work, this seems to fall flat. Of course it isn’t Gravity’s Rainbow - but maybe it is the Gravity’s Rainbow of the people-in-their-seventies-set - and in that case I was very impressed with how accurately the Internet of the age, the New York of the age, the totality of the world of the age was portrayed. In this case, Gravity’s Rainbow was brilliant because of its timing and its bursting forth of the paranoia and angst of the era where the only reality is thematically hidden - and in this same way, while not as technically brilliant - Bleeding Edge is the paranoia and fear that he wrote about decades ago presented in our real world… Essentially, with all that truth behind it, why hide it anymore?

There were a few blazingly beautiful moments - one, a scene where a character is looking out of a train window as it overtakes another train. You can't miss it.

Pychon's gift has always been his humor. His novels are generally a slog, and what keeps the reader going are the barrage of remarkable insights and clever humor. This time, however, Pynchon misses the mark with stale insights, sophomoric (more than usual) humor, and a sense of irony that simply does not keep up with the irony-ness of the times. Older readers may be intrigued, but younger, working people will wonder why this old fart bothered to write this thing at all.

[...]

Sorting Things Out (On Pynchon's Bleeding Edge)

September 14, 2013

It's here. Nine months after an Internet rumor that gestated into details ever more elusive and a glimpse of the first couple of paragraphs, Penguin Press has delivered Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, a historical romance about 9/11, the dot com bust, and New York City. Four hundred and seventy-seven pages spanning the period from March, 2001, to February, 2002, it's a Pynchon novel about a time and place most of his readers will have lived through. Yet, the events seem as far away as Malta in 1919 or Peenemunde in the 1940's. That's what Pynchon does best: show us how our memories are made to cast shadows on the fleeting and evanescent present.

And Bleeding Edge is almost certainly about the present, the here and now. Pynchon's use of the present tense throughout the novel, except for the frequent flashbacks, is reminiscent of the opening of Gravity's Rainbow--hallucinatory and ominous. The present tense turns some parts into one of those interactive text-based games from the late 1970's--unadorned and urgent. Other parts of the book read like a film treatment, a gentle nudge to some bold director. If Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014) is half as popular as I expect, filmmakers take notice of Bleeding Edge. Let me suggest Mary Herron for the job. Maxine Tarnow (nee Loeffler and to be portrayed, IMHO, by Catherine Keener), Pynchon's fraud investigating heroine off the licensure grid, is as interesting as Betty Paige or Valerie Solanas and could take on Patrick Bateman, a prototypical yuppie similar to the ones encountered in Bleeding Edge, although with more homicidal tendencies.

But the present tense is not just a gimmick. Although set twelve years ago, the narrative is about the unfolding of 9/11, a portal into a new world as uncertain as the many links and urls that Maxine follows in her quest within the Deep Web. Pynchon describes the Web as the eternal present, time flattened, measured, if at all, by clicks. After 9/11, Heidi, Maxine's Rhoda, says that everyone has been infantilized, and Maxine feels the regressive force of that tragedy on a New York City street, where she feels in a time warp. Maxine finds comfort in recognizing her surroundings as what had to be "the present" and "the normal." The present of the Bleeding Edge may be shell shock or the desire to set to zero the delta-t's Pynchon wrote earnestly about once.

Quests for Pynchon have always been about sorting things out. Maxine searches for answers both before and after 9/11. The tease is whether the quest changes with the attacks. For those who poo-poo conspiracies and paranoia, the fall of the towers may have been a wake-up call. Or it may have been a random event not connected to broader plots or schemes. We are reminded early on about another 9/11, in Chile, 1973, when the CIA assassinated Allende. While the connectedness of all history into plot is presented in bold operatic style in Gravity's Rainbow, the tensions are given a more human scale in Bleeding Edge. How to make sense of things? Does the explanation for the Event explain everything? Or is it just one of the many mysteries, mundane and quotidian?

Maxwell's Demon is a metaphor that appears in The Crying of Lot 49 explicitly, but also pervades all of Pynchon's work. Imagine a box filled with particles of gas moving at different speeds. Partition the box and place a trap door on the partition. Maxwell's Demon stands guard at the door, letting particles of certain speed go through while slower particles stay behind. Eventually the particles are sorted out into high speed, high temperature ones and low speed, low temperature ones. The entropy in the box has decreased without any work on the part of the Demon except for the mental work of sorting. Magically, the Demon defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by allowing less disorder with no expenditure of energy.

Sorting things out is what folks in Pynchon novels do whether it is Oedipa uncovering the layers of America long hidden, Mason & Dixon drawing their line, Prairie Wheeler figuring out the Sixties, the Webb Children negotiating different vectors of capitalism, Doc discovering where all the sex, drugs and rock& roll went. Bleeding Edge is no different. We follow Maxine, a forensic accountant, as she examines balance sheets, web sites, financial records, in order to detect fraud and thereby find the truth. Conspiracies permeate the novel both before and after the Event, and when it occurs, it is depicted quietly but powerfully. Bleeding edge technology is one that is so untried and untested that no one knows where it might take us. Characters in Pynchon's historic romance walk the bleeding edge to an uncertain and perhaps unreachable future. They are, like the readers who take them in and define them, caught in a present sorting out the enveloping experiences.

All of which might suggest that the book has no resolutions and leaves the reader hanging. That would be a mistake. At least this reader found the process of sorting things out envigorating and moving. As readers we are not trapped in an eternal present, and Maxine and her host of comrades are moving inexorably to where we are now.

The novel begins and ends with the maternal act of tending after children. But Maxine's maternalism shifts through the novel. The conclusion is not so much about children flying the nest as about parents' guarding at a distance. One thinks about the mantra "Keep cool, but care" from V. In Bleeding Edge, that shibboleth might be "Keep distant, but help," a lesson somewhat more affirmative, more active than the earlier renunciation. Towards the end of the novel, Maxine expresses her concerns about her sons to her father: "I don't want to see them turn into their classmates, cynical smart-mouthed little bastards--but what if Ziggy and Otis start caring too much, Pop, this world, it could destroy them so easily." And as she wondered, I thought back to an earlier scene in which Maxine watches the firefighters clean up the rubble at "Ground Zero" and wonder what drives them to work as selflessly as they do. Is it possible for someone to care too much?

The novel begins with a great joke at Pynchon's expense. He describes the philosophy of a fictional Otto Kugelblitz, an errant student of Freud. Kugelblitz posits four stages for human development: the solipsism of youth, the sexual hysteria of adolescence and young adulthood, the paranoia of middle life, and the dementia of late life. These four stages culminate in death, the only form of sanity. Is Pynchon mapping his own trajectory? The truth is Pynchon in his novels seems to go through all four stages at the same time: the solipsism of the narrative voice, the erotic fetishes and urges of his characters, the ever-present and overplayed paranoia, and the demented propensities for bad puns and critical jabs. Singling up the four stages is the search for meaning and the realization that the mental quest pales before actual human contact, emotion, and connection.

Gravity's Rainbow ended in fragments as the grand paranoid schemes gave way to counterforces. The five novels after Gravity's Rainbow present different responses to the ubiquitous and oppressive System: family in Vineland, work and engagement in Mason & Dixon, social participation in Against the Day, clarity of purpose in Inherent Vice, and now simple, pure love and caring in Bleeding Edge. We have the joy to see how Pynchon tries to sort things out through the various worlds that he lovingly and carefully projects for us. Polymath as Pynchon is called, there is no pretense to have all or any answers, but his imagination has shown us possibilities that transcend labels like post-modern, or realist, or minimalist, or even historical romance.

`Now, everybody--'
.

Mr. Pynchon gets too full of himself and loves to go on tangents full of verbal diarrhea that are distracting to the story. He also thinks that he is hysterically funny when his humor is old, redundant and predictable. Thanks for ruining a good story that had lots of potential. The tangents are so distracting the reader cant keep track of the story line. I didn't finish the book and wish I could get a refund.

Pynchon never fails to confound even polarize. You either adore his outings or profoundly struggle to understand his importance. Bleeding Edge is a vast, multi tentacled muddy meander that does not subscribe to normal plot structure. One reviewer stated it could be three hundred pages less or just go on. It is an aimless journey that should not be read by the anal. Instead it should be treated as a rambling dialogue that with frequency throws off cool, thought-provoking bits worthy of collection.

For me this included the comparison of the twin Buddhas destroyed in Afghanistan by The Taliban and the Twin Towers. Pynchon is 76 years old and he throws out consistently intriguing and accurate pop culture references from the dotcom era and 9/11. This is important for his command of the era and the hint at nostalgia for a largely pre-terrorism world. The man can write too as evidenced by these lines:

- “The past, hey no s***, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.”

- “Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.”

- “Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush.”

Overall the plot struggles to sell us on a horrible conspiracy, “After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them.”

Most readers and reviewers have focused on technology being the conspiracy. They assume Pynchon sees the bad in progress. I believe that the author has little faith in people themselves. In one powerful and bitter swipe he addresses civility and commercialism in one fell swoop, “Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism “Excuse me.” At another point he writes, “Same old Satanic pact, only more of it.” For me the pact or conflict relates to human behaviour and its failings.

Slate Magazine's podcast, The Audio Book Club, has a lively discussion covering this book. What was interesting was the three reviewers confusing simultaneous defence and attack of the work. I feel for them as I am divided as well thus the weak three star review. I can neither recommend or dissuade. There are incredible bon mots inside a struggle of a novel so it is up to you to decided if this is an attractive proposition.

Trying to be hip by creating a plodding story that constantly side tracks with impossible characters that don't drive the plot anywhere. I was excited to get this book based on a couple of reviews and Pynchon's previous work but what a let down, Dense and uninteresting filled with idiotic stereotypes would be the best way to describe it.

Really bad take on tech during the time frame of the story just adds to the misery that awaits anyone that dares try and suffer through this mess. The whole idiotic suggestion of a VR world that couldn't have existed when this was supposed to have taken place showed how poorly this story was conceived. The way it portrays "hackers/programmers/geeks" is maybe the worst I've ever read. Ugh!

Most of the time this is the sort of book I'd read in a couple of days but I think I am on week three of trying to get through this horrible waste of trees. I went to read the other the store reviews to see what I'm missing and I see mostly, not a thing. I've going to stop the pain and leave it unfinished!

I give up, you win horrible book!!

I would give this less stars if I could. I was trying to remember why I didn't think I liked Pynchon and them my book group picked this book and I remembered. Wow how ponderous and exhausting. Save yourself a part of your life you'll never get back if you waste it reading this book. There are so many better books out there. You're never going to get to read everything you want to before you die so skip this book and know your remaining reading days will have more meaning.

BLEEDING EDGE is set in 2001, at the height of the dot.com boom, and in the time leading up to and beyond 9/11. Through a series of short, almost breathlessly written chapters, it recreates the atmosphere of paranoia inherent in New York City at that time. In Pynchon's view, this was not so much due to the perceived 'threat' of terrorism; rather many people felt themselves to be part of a 'get-rich-quick' world, in which individuals made and lost fortunes with equal facility. Even if they didn't make fortunes, they inhabited a world in which distinctions between 'good' and 'evil' or 'honesty' and 'corruption' no longer applied. Everyone was out for themselves. Within that overall historical framework Pynchon creates a picaresque tale in which the central character, a fraud investigator, becomes more and more enmeshed within this world of corruption. She tries to retain her integrity - even though she has been officially declassified as a fraud investigator - but finds the task increasingly more difficult. The style of BLEEDING EDGE is quite simply breathtaking; Pynchon has a gift for language that few American novelists writing today actually possess. However I do have to admit that it is rather difficult to read, especially for a non-American unacquainted with contemporary New York argot. Maybe it's not argot at all, but a peculiarly Pynchonesque language; like Joyce, he has a gift for creating linguistic worlds of his own. But I have to admit that I ended up skipping some of the lengthier passages of description in order to pick up the threads of the novel's complicated plot.

As someone who considers himself fairly well-read, I am simultaneously embarrassed and proud of myself - embarrassed that I had never read anything by Thomas Pynchon and proud that I have now made my way through his most recent novel. I'm also simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted. Tackling "Bleeding Edge" required enormous energy. I look forward to reading more of his work, but not for a while. I need time to recuperate.

For years, I've seen Pynchon's name referenced as one of the writers most admired by other writers along with such titans as Alice Munro, George Saunders, David Mitchell, and Marilynne Robinson. How could I consider myself semi-literate if I hadn't ever read him? So I plunged into his 2013 novel "Bleeding Edge."

What a ride.

Within the first half-dozen pages, my jaw was dropping at the velocity of the robust narration and I was guffawing at the hilarious images, tweeting out gems of lines such as "Dizzy's learning curve is permanently flat-lined." And so many countless more along the way: "I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers" and "Maxine could conduct workshops in Conquering Eyeroll" and "`I'm an adulteress!' Vyrva wails quietly. `Ah, come on. Adolescentress, maybe'" and on and on and on.

But being delighted by the scrumptiousness of such snippets is like licking the peaks of whipped frosting not recognizing that they are perched on an enormous confectionary creation that defies thorough digestion by us ordinary mortals and whose recipe includes far more arsenic than sugar. Which is not to say that "Bleeding Edge" is indigestible but rather that you need to observe mother's ordinance to chew each mouthful twenty times before attempting to swallow and that you should relinquish any hope of being able to fully clean your plate in one lifespan.

What is it about "Bleeding Edge" that makes reading it such a satisfying and draining endeavour? The vibrant characters whose innermost workings of brain, heart, and libido we think we grasp only to have them yanked out of our hands; the complex plot that reads like an amalgam of front page news, secretive espionage files, nineteenth century murder mysteries, and nearly impenetrable science fiction; the illusions running from quantum physics to pop culture icons; the ceaseless gyrations from identifiable New York City streetscapes to imaginative worlds of deep treacherous cyberspace.

I will read more Thomas Pynchon, once I catch my breath.

It's going to take a certain kind of reader, with proclivities in one direction rather than another, to appreciate this book. Pynchon, whom I only discovered fairly recently, was writing and recognized when I was a young adult. All these decades later, he remains true to himself and isn't apologetic. In some ways, his writing is a time capsule of sorts; and I thank him for that. I like the meat and pith the way he presents it.

He is a master of rich, descriptive language and uses it to the best effect. In this manner, his writing is here to be savored, bit by bit, rather than rammed down the gullet. There may be more than a little irony in that last statement, as Pynchon is making his views about history, about this techie word we live in vitally clear. But look at it this way: we wouldn't have wanted to come to the party if we didn't want to dance!

I suspect there will be people who not only won't appreciate his take on 9/11; they will probably rail against the scenario and details he advances. For others of us, beyond the sheer horror of what happened on that day, we continue to be mystified by the fallout.

Bleeding edge is about more than slumming through the world Post-Dot-Com and Post 9/11. The characters inhabit a world that's on the brink... of what... who knows!

I actually listened to the audiobook, and critics have somewhat dismissed Jeannie Berlin's narration. Quirky as her voice was (I have no idea what she really sounds like; so I can't judge here), I actually found it complemented the book, giving rise to an additional dimension of craziness. Don't know if this was intentional or not, but it sure worked for me.

I enjoyed the book exceedingly, as I have the others by Pynchon I’ve read. The amount of background research going into them I find staggering to contemplate, effortless as it always comes off in his telling. His command of our native tongue is matchless, as is his humor, dark and otherwise.

I’ve found this the most approachable of his novels, as I could follow his story line and its many digressions better than usually. It so well mirrors the preoccupations and fears of us educated folk (perhaps especially those who may have lived on the Upper West Side of NYC during the reign of the younger Bush), and it makes its world so compellingly ours, that we find ourselves sucked into his story as by a vacuum cleaner. Its world remains with us, with no noticeable exit, our shaky world before and after 9/11. How can we ask that Pynchon’s tale end fully resolved?

Pynchon’s cyber world is with us too, and we increasingly dwell within it, usually unaware of its darker underpinnings with which he has masterfully played in this unsettling book. Writer of cult classics or not, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon lives way up there in the pantheon of America’s novelists.

I'm giving it a 5 mostly because of what I think Pynchon's done narratively - and it's epically, deliriously entertaining. He's a scop, like one of those Old English storytellers alternately sitting or standing before a totem of iconic figures, and he's unrolling to us a way to see the Grendel among us. His hero, however, is not of Beowulfian dimensions - in fact he's an ex-wife/mother-she, and not a warrior at all, but a de-licensed PI now sniffing out fraud. And everybody, to some degree, is bleeding fraudulence.

The joy comes through once you hear Pynchon's voice weaving through thoughts and scenes, and then, voila, you enter the theatre of the story. I open up randomly now to page 41: "As a paid-up member of the Yentas With Attitude Local, Maxine has been snooping diligently . . . . The first thing that jumps out of the bushes, waggling its dick so to speak, is a Benford's Law anomaly in some of the expenses." And he's everywhere - One of my favorites being his/the scop's description of Maxine's perception of Tallis' ensemble on 128:

"Tallis has perfected the soap-opera trick of managing through all the daylight hours to look turned out for evening activities. High-end makeup, hair in a tousled bob with every strand expensively disarranged, taking its time, whenever she gestures with her head, to slide back into the artful confusion . . . . Italian shoes that only once a year are found on sale at prices humans can afford--some humans--emerald earrings weighing in at a half carat each, Hermes watch, Art Deco ring of Golconda diamonds which every time she passes through the sunlight coming in the window flares into a nearly blinding white, like a superheroine's magical flashbang for discombobulating the bad guys. Who, it will occur to Maxine more than once during their tete-a tete, maybe includes herself."

And that last sentence, of course, the sly aside - among many slip-slidin here and there, let's us in on the showman and (like Tallis' hair) the expansively disarranged, artful confusion of the show. It would be a joy to watch this thing live, because the characters are not standard bearers of down-and-upgraded values but a menagerie of urban underground and aboveground denizens, all wickedly crafted, that might be served up like those life-like puppets attached to their handlers. It is, for lack of a more insightful designation - an awesomely artful job. And funny.

Maxine Tarnow ist eine private Ermittlerin in Betrugsfällen und sie hat gut zu tun in diesem New Yorker Frühsommer 2001. Die erste Dotcom-Blase ist geplatzt; die Überlebenden versuchen zu retten, was zu retten ist, egal mit welchen Mitteln. Maxine beschäftigt sich mit einem Unternehmen, das Sicherheitssoftware herstellt und dessen zwielichtigem Chef, einem milliardenschweren Computer-Nerd. Dazu ihr Nebenjob als Mutter und Beinahe-Ehefrau; das Schicksal hat ihr kein leichtes Päckchen geschnürt.

Sie taucht ein in die verstörenden Tiefen des Internets und findet dort Bedrohliches, das sie nicht immer versteht, ihr aber trotzdem Angst macht. Auch im real life häufen sich merkwürdige Begebenheiten, sie trifft auf die russische Mafia und bald gibt es den ersten Toten. Und dann sind da noch die seltsamen Videos, die man ihr zuspielt, in diesen ersten Tagen des Septembers 2001...

Ich bin eigentlich eher skeptisch mit Begriffen wie »Kultautor«, und ein solcher ist Thomas Pynchon ohne Zweifel, nicht nur, weil er die Öffentlichkeit konsequent scheut. Also war »Bleeding Edge« meine erste Begegnung mit ihm, aber es wird nicht die letzte gewesen sein, so viel ist sicher. Faszinierend sind seine geschliffene Sprachgewalt und der spielerische Umgang mit Worten, ebenso die Vielzahl der Charaktere, deren bisweilen skurrile Geschichten genüsslich ausgebreitet werden. Trotzdem behält der Plot eine gewisse Stringenz bei, die Geschehnisse werden zügig vorangetrieben, und das gelingt bei einem Werk dieses Umfangs nicht vielen Schriftstellern.

Und so ist »Bleeding Edge« viel mehr als ein weiterer 9/11-Roman, obwohl das natürlich ein zentrales Thema des Buches ist und auch die entsprechenden Verschwörungstheorien nicht fehlen dürfen in einer zutiefst neurotischen Gesellschaft, die detailliert beschrieben und seziert wird. Die ungeheure Dichte von Sprache und Handlung verlangt dem Leser einiges ab, aber wenn er sich darauf einlässt, wird er reichlich belohnt, von mir eine klare Empfehlung!

In a lot of ways, "Bleeding Edge" is reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49. The protagonist, Maxine, though seemingly starting from a more capable position than Oedipa Maas, is soon enough entangled in a web of conspiracy leaving her with no clear ideas of what is true and what is not. The conspiracies in "Bleeding Edge" are, if anything, more ephemeral due to their focus in and around tech companies and the internet. And, as in Pynchon's earlier novel, these conspiracies first entice Maxine (and the reader) with their plausibility only to eventually grow to proportions that render them fantastical. But Maxine (and the reader) are still left with no good explanations--if the conspiracy theories are ridiculous, how do we explain the unexplainable coincidences of the story, but if they are true, how do we comprehend the implications? Pynchon, of course, does not provide any easy answers, and these circular considerations are key to both books.

The prose in "Bleeding Edge" is snappy and wandering at the same time, with narration seamlessly transitioning from memory (past tense) to flashback (present tense) in the same paragraph or sentence. It is a bit disconcerting at first, but soon becomes expected and serves to keep the story moving at a quick pace.

Pynchon remains enamoured of popular culture, filling the novel to bursting with references pertaining to the setting of the story, NYC in 2001. These vacillate between reinforcing the verisimilitude of the setting and being in-jokes for the reader experiencing this past from the near future. Most are easy to pick up only twelve years on from the events of the novel, but it is interesting to consider which of these will fade with time; some already raise the inevitable question, "What were we thinking?"

Of course, being set in NYC in 2001, the events of September 11 figure in the story and contribute to the compounding conspiracy theories, but it is handled well. Rather than "truther" scenarios being central, the main focus of the plot is on more mundane and less specific acts of embezzlement, money funneled to unknown agents, corporate espionage, and the agendas of U.S. security forces. By the time the World Trade Center is sucked into the vortex of conspiracy, Maxine (and the reader) have already begun to question just how much of it is real. It is a fact of the setting, but it is never clear if it is a fact of the plot.

I understand that Mr. Pynchon is intelligent, even a genius, but if this is a sample of his writing - that part is very suspect.
Can't stay with the story, goes far afield with trying to impress us, the readers with how much he knows. I just want a story.
Do not buy this book. Our book club selected it for May and nobody could finish it. We had many copies of this book that we couldn't even give away. It was so terrible that the discussion of it was 15 minutes of "just can't get through it".

Pynchon’s fascinating foray into the high tech trailblazing landscape of the early two thousands. When reading most of his novels, I end up overlooking the intricacies of plot in favor of relishing the amazing nuances of language and impossibly brilliant creativity on every page. His tip of the hat to Tim Leary on page 475 was pregnant with meaning and soul-tingling to me. Leary was always extremely captivated by the evolution of high tech; and, of course, was a huge fan of Pynchon’s work, starting with the mind-expanding experience of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Pynchon manages to accomplish the incredible: a novel rich in history with ingenious storytelling and character development; and continually pioneering uses of language and dialogue that leave the reader profoundly transformed. From the lofty erudition, to the down and dirty street parlance you have grown to know and love - that he equally nails down so perfectly - it’s all in here!

As I read I felt as if the author and I were speaking different languages. The characters were many and confusing as well as bizarre. I am in a Book Club and none of our members liked the book. On a scale on 1 to 10, it was rated a 2 by those who read the entire book. Others disliked it so much they stopped reading before getting to the end. We didn't like the characters and no one was able to find anything they felt was a redeeming quality in the book. The author does use high vocabulary but leaves the reader wishing for so much more in an understandable story line. The main character was a female detective and what she did to get her information and the way she handled her marriage did not show moral values especially since she had two young boys. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

Bleeding Edge presents a relatively straightforward narrative that follows a single character down a rabbit hole of intrigue. It all takes place in New York City, during roughly the year straddling the morning of 11 September 2001. This date casts shadows over the book, even as the story is not about that day, or at least not quite. It's impact is felt and assimilated by the city and the characters. There are paranoid clues that something is coming, and cynicism in its wake. The mood, the numbing effect of a city under siege and the searching for meaning or blame in the tragedy are understated but feel true to life. This book is as much proof as we might ever have that the author has indeed been living on the Upper West Side and share's the neighborhood's quirks and foibles.

Silicon Alley is the context—post-bubble bursting, tech entrepreneurs chastened but coders still wide-eyed, the whole sector and Internet on the brink of infection by the establishment. Our central character, ex-CFE Maxine Tarnow, journeys to the frontier of a nascent network and returns, well, not really transformed, but, I think, renewed. From one New York springtime to another, she returns to her children, a year older and wiser, and an ex-husband spared from tragedy by circumstance. There's a surprising amount of sympathy elicited for the amoral federal agent who becomes collateral damage in a larger cover-up, yet little for the reluctant whistleblower he killed before Maxine could save him. And our proto-maniacal Internet start-up founder is chastened, but this, it is implied, is merely a speed bump on an ascent to higher power. People move on, but there is little sense of closure.

As he has aged, Thomas Pynchon's writing has mellowed, becoming more accessible and approachable. In this way, Bleeding Edge feels like an east coast companion to Inherent Vice. As would be expected, the descriptive passages are spot-on, colorfully evoking the time and place, sprinkled with contemporary references and in-joke puns, and populated by bevy of two-dimensional characters trading witty dialogue. The stylistic devices that one either loves or hates about the author are deployed with his usual craft.

This being a Pynchon novel, one shouldn't expect every paranoid and metaphysical question raised to actually be answered, but there seemed to be more than the usual number of plot threads left dangling than usual. It's significant, I think, that the ones that are resolved relate primarily, perhaps surprisingly, to family. In many ways, Bleeding Edge reminds one of the Crying of Lot 49. To my recollection, it suffers in the comparison; but then, many books would. I don't fault the author for revisiting the same themes and ideas in different contexts. To me, Bleeding Edge is a trip down memory lane in way that his books set in California could never be—the hometown touches are fun and poignant for those of us who were actually there. I enjoyed it for that, and I would recommend the book to any curious reader, but, still, I wish the book had cut a little deeper into this vein rich with possibilities.

Zillions of plot threads that eventually lead nowhere to speak of, characters as cartoons rather than full-blooded creations (except the well-drawn Maxi Tarnow heroine), wild and soaring metaphors and assorted wordplay, silly songs and funny jokes--it's always a treat to wade into a Pynchon novel.

Pynchon still has his inventive chops well into his 70s and his genius for creating a sense of time and place as he does this time in the Upper West Side of NYC and the characters that inhabit it is unparalleled. There are people who know a little bit about everything--Pynchon is one of those freaks who knows a lot about EVERYTHING! In BLEEDING EDGE, his primary obsession is the Internet's growing dominance and the geek culture of Silicon Alley leading up to September 11th.

Plus there are shenanigans involving Russian mobsters, Jewish protesters, CIA and FBI operatives, commodities traders, Islamic missile slingers, and so forth. And, as usual, there is little coherence to all this, but if it's coherence is what you want, then why the heck would you be reading a Pynchon book?

For pure entertainment, brilliant writing, and a world view that's prescient and utterly compelling, Pynchon is the best there is.

Proof that Thomas Pynchon is a/the 21st-century writer of U.S.A. I read this novel amid a bunch of DeLillo, whom I find utterly humorless. The latter's short story, "Angel Esmeralda" (the title story), was wonderful, smart. Otherwise, I feel every page of DeLillo (and in the wrong way), while Pynchon makes me read and re-read, and laugh, and think. I still am looking for the DeepWeb, which exists, or at least it should/or has to exist. Pynchon's research is death-defying. How much work went into writing this novel, in terms of understanding 21st-century technology, is humbling. And, then he combines this research into these fun, paranoid narratives. Some think his paranoid narratives are unreal, but they are too real given the Wellbutrin/Zoloft/Hypnotist culture in which we live (or, sort of). Indeed, drawing on Brecht (and the theory that each age/context requires a new kind of aesthetic that challenges an audience/reader), I argue his novels have created a new kind of realist aesthetic. A Pynchon realism. Anyway, I was stoked with the Iowa Kum & Go reference; I am easy.

Yehudi Menuhin once said: Don't use your music to display your technique. Use your technique to display the music.
The same can be said about good writers.
Here Pynchon seems to be using the book to display his writing technique-- which admittedly is often terrific-- rather than using his technique to display the book, as he did (imo) in Gravity's Rainbow.
Perhaps this is why this book seemed a bit empty to a few other reviewers, as it does to me.
Apparently just as trills are not enough in music, so the occasional writerly fireworks are not enough in a book.
Two stars.

Here’s my advice if you decide to read Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Bleeding Edge: sit back, relax, laugh, and let him take you to people and places for amusement and entertainment. Don’t bother trying to keep track or figure things out: this is a plot-free novel. It’s a romp through New York City with protagonist Maxine Tarnow whose investigation provides the action for the novel. Pynchon sets the novel at the end of the dot.com bubble, and while we know 9/11 is coming, he handles that with precision. Thoughts about conspiracies abound, and shady characters are found everywhere, even in virtual reality called “DeepArcher.” The writing soars on every page, and the realistic dialogue made me feel like I was in Manhattan. While I caught many of his references, I know I missed more than I caught. I could care less about what I might have missed because I laughed a lot, and enjoyed the time spent reading these 500 pages.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)

Sigh... There is no question Pynchon is a talented writer. There is also no question that while he is writing circles around his reader he loses them along the way and unfortunately I was one of those readers this time out. The main character was too passive and ultimately was consumed by the plot.

Review by GirlWellRead.blogspot.com

This was my first foray into the literary world of Pynchon, and I get the sense that starting with Bleeding Edge is somewhat akin to listening to King of Limbs as your first taste of Radiohead. This book clearly has its supporters, I mean it was a NBA finalist after all. But I personally have to wonder how much of the positivity comes from a place of long time Pynchon fanhood.

I really wanted to like this book, I honestly did, but I haven't been this happy to be done with a book in quite some time. There are some truly great moments, but they are few and far between and thus the nearly 500 pages of material that require one's full awareness (you can't speed read this stuff, it takes rapt attention to keep up) felt unrewarding. Add to that the fact that the book is partly an homage to pre 9-11 NYC, and if you aren't intimately familiar with that city (I've been once), it likely will not and cannot resonate with you as it will with someone who is.

As far as characters go, I liked Maxine but felt that most, if not all, others were fairly indistinguishable. They appear rapid fire, and weave in and out of the story in an almost dreamlike manner. Their dialogue demonstrated the quick wit that I've often heard Pynchon possesses, but it frequently tipped the scales so far toward corny that it neutralized the clever, and bordered at times on annoying.

I thought for much of the book that it was headed for a two star rating, but I'm giving it 3 stars. The book improves quite a bit after the 9/11 attacks, but what truly earned the third star was the name of the strip club: Joie de Beavre. That was the one great laugh out loud moments for me. It will probably be the thing I most remember about Bleeding Edge.

I was burned by the hype, got to the Pynchon party too late, and I'm not a New York City guy. Bleeding Edge and I were probably doomed from the start.

I liked most of this very much. To help follow the characters, who tend to pop up like targets in a video game, I suggest keeping a diagram of who knows whom & how. There's no suggestion to assist with the section of techno-speak, but it's mercifully brief. I'm sorry to say that roughly the last third felt very bogged down. The only justification I can think of for this is that the author wanted readers, thereby, to share the experience the characters had of mousing through the landscape with only the occasional click revealing something significant. I would have been willing to accept the author's description.

Whatever you do read the paper version of this book and not the audio version. The woman who reads it is simply not up to the task. Many of the characters sound alike and she commonly emphasized the wrong words in the dialogue. This is a very witty and creative book with many unique characters and much is lost of this interesting and awarded novel. What accents she does use you still hear the ever present reader. This is a vast and superior story and certainly deserves to be read and not listened to and I really regretted my choice of medium.

What Pynchon has always offered American Literature is an authentic leftist critique of our culture. And Bleeding Edge is no different. Far from being merely an aimless collection of awful puns, stereotyped characters, virtuoso prose, madcap antics, and detective genre parody, beneath the sprawling, sparkling surface of Bleeding Edge is a picture of America in thrall to greed. The pursuit of profit has superseded the pursuit of happiness, paranoia exists most dangerously at the highest levels of power, and ordinary Americans are complicit in their own refusal to confront either the true costs of the comforts and conveniences they enjoy, or the dark forces at work in their own government. In Pynchon's view, the real tragedy of 9/11 lies not in the lives lost that day, or in a national loss of innocence, but in the fact that nothing was learned. 9/11 could have been a turning point, a chance to pay the karmic bill that Late Capitalism has run up and take a new direction. Instead we have only doubled down on our greed, passively allowed the government to assuage our paranoid and misdirected fears with the creation of a new security state, and let the Internet, which once held the promise of new possibilities for Utopian space and escape, succumb to the usual forces of commercialization, surveillance, and control.

That Pynchon has managed to write such a buoyant, vibrant, and generously entertaining novel with these bleak but wise observations at its core can only be viewed as a minor miracle. Written in the brisk, direct and straightforward (for Pynchon) pseudo-noir style of Inherent Vice, the prose frustrates at times from being a little too clipped, too eager to show off its command of a plethora of jargons. If it feels like lightweight Pynchon, who can blame him for wanting to create something accessible to a larger audience? When faced with the fall of the Twin Towers or a whispered death threat on an answering machine, Maxine's sudden realizations that it's ultimately only her family that matters reveal the human heart of Bleeding Edge, and the compassion that, yes, even Thomas Pynchon has in spades.

"Few novelists have the paradoxical ability to make readers feel smart and stupid at the same time. Thomas Pynchon has been pulling off this virtuoso feat for several decades, especially since the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow, his watershed masterpiece, which, quite honestly, he never topped. His most recent work, Bleeding Edge, examines the early 21st century, from the burst of the dot com bubble to the horrifying events of September 11. I have not, even to this day, ever read an uninteresting Pynchon novel."- By Jeremy Light

Read the full review:http://www.countylinemagazine.com/November-December-2013/Bleeding-Edge/

As an avid reader, the spectrum of what I generally have in my hands (paper, nothing electronic for me) ranges from the classic Southern Novels to fast paced crime novels set in some European Locale. I stumbled across this book in the dungeon discount section of a major book reseller, stuck between the daring romance section and teen coming of age novels. For the few bucks being asked for this book I figured there wasn't much to lose. I made three attempts to read this book and found it to be on the most confusing, mixed up collection of thoughts I've even seen attributed to paper. Sixty pages into the book I could not tell you anything this book is about or what kind of the story the author is trying to build. The thoughts seemed scattered across the pages with little cohesion or order- almost as if Pynchon was making too much of an effort to be "clever" in his writing. By page 65, the book was abandoned and put in the outgoing Goodwill box.

Bleeding Edge, the eighth novel by acclaimed postmodern author Thomas Pynchon, is a work which stands well against his most famous novels, such as Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon. Bleeding Edge toes the line between fact and fiction, with real world references to everything from 9/11 to the videogame Halo’s launch trailer, while being filled with pseudo-references to things that either do not exist, or exist in a completely different form than presented in book. The novel, similarly to Pynchon’s last novel Inherent Vice, is a detective story, or at least it seems to be one. Over the course of the novel, the conspiracies become denser and occasionally it makes the reader feel as if he or she is the one creating the conspiracies, as opposed to the characters. The search for answers begins to fade into the background, and the true focus of the novel, the journey the protagonist Maxine Tarnow takes, comes into the foreground. Maxine struggles to uncover corruption and murder mysteries, just as she struggles to accept her rapidly aging children, who are growing into adults right before her eyes.
One of the best aspects of the novel is Pynchon’s prose. Pynchon finds a wonderful balance between readability and his postmodern roots. Another great piece of the novel is the large cast of characters Pynchon creates: from a rouge documentary filmmaker to a freelance professional “nose” who uses his sense of smell to uncover crimes, with a range of characters in between. However, these aspects do have their downsides. For example, the large cast can create confusion for the read and may cause some to repeatedly search the internet for a character list. The intricacies of Pynchon’s writing have been known to cause confusion as well and some passages may require multiple readings to understand.
Bleeding Edge is a novel which demands both focus and time; however, it makes for one of the best reads in recent years. Pynchon has created another masterwork which will only help to cement his place in literary history.

I have some complicated emotions about this novel. So let me start off with what's good, because there is a lot that is brilliant about this book. Pynchon does an admirable job recreating the atmosphere of New York as a city. The pulse, down to the mundane moments of dropping your kids off at school are wonderfully portrayed and extremely true to life. And yet, into this normalcy he's injected a true paranoia. The novel is enveloped in a dangerous mystery, and it's almost as if as the dot com boom and height of web 1.0 decays, its half life grows increasingly toxic. Situated in New York right before the fall of the Twin Towers, it's hard not to feel slightly nauseous at it all, ready to fall into the conspiracy theory this book presents. And, surprisingly, it can actually be pretty funny. Protagonist Maxine has a way of pretending to know what she's talking about, only to wind up being completely incorrect, that never really loses its comedic payoff.

However, throughout the novel, it feels as if Pynchon is trying too hard to be clever. He develops a writing style that seeks to blend narration with thoughts with dialogue, sometimes leaving you in a confusing situation where you don't know who's saying what, especially since people have a tendency to speak in a kind of you-know-what-I-mean shorthand. Worse, the entire writing style is over-complicated, and often you will have to reread a paragraph a couple of times, only to realize that he's set up a complicated sentence that ultimately ends up to be only a fragment. Added to this is a tendency to incompletely introduce characters and to never reintroduce them (for instance, Maxine sees a new-age psychiatrist named Sean, and sometimes the scene will jump and the page will read "so she put it to Sean.." rather than, perhaps, "at her next appointment she put it to Sean, which would help jog my memory as to who the heck Sean is), an impulse I sympathize with when you want to create an organic narration, but one which I think is a serious misstep. There are too many characters with too specific a role to trust readers to be able to keep them all straight 100% of the time.

All of this leads to a book that is more confusing than it needs to be, and can make it difficult to turn the page. All in all, though, definitely a book worth reading. The premise is interesting, the mood fantastically rendered, and it will certainly be a book that is talked about for a long time to come. So definitely read it it, just expect some annoyance along the way.

So many writers have lost their imagination. How can it be that Pynchon, with his mentions of AKIRA's Neo-Tokyo, GHOST IN THE SHELL, to Reagan's involvement in Central America, can still manage to give us the best visualizations? His meticulously observed rendering of history both pop-culture and political, solidifies his image as one of the best listeners in literature. Oddball hackers, psychosexual outsiders, dim-lit diners occupied by Italians and Russians, the universe of BLEEDING EDGE is such a joy to visit and with all its classic Pynchonian humor, there is the deeper contemplation about the 21st century and the military industrial complex. His gift for offering an intellectual thesis while still anatomizing 9/11 conspiracy theories is unmatched, just like the generation of fearless writers (Burroughs, Vonnegut, PKD, Serling) that he arrived on the scene with.

Pynchon's disdain for "late ***kin' Capitalism" and its detrimental side-effects on human culture and interaction is, we'll say... slightly evident. Maybe that's just my interpretation, but I think the Christmas carol parable reinforces my statement, and the comment regarding the economic holy war and how different styles of commerce can be viewed as religions was brilliantly put. When a writer of his reputation publishes a novel, the multitude of people who'll read it can be staggeringly high, which is why in an age of "career novelists" (to quote Alan Moore - a brilliant writer himself!) where authors publish work to get a paycheck, or stay in the game, it is such a pleasure to see Pynchon stay true to his values and to what he believes are the issues that are tormenting our globe. And it isn't like he's moaning or complaining about the issues, he's conceptualizing them, like an expert historian, and showing just how we got to said torment. Thomas Pynchon, it would seem, is as fearless and creative as ever!

Driven by research with endless references, clever analysis of etymology (the karaoke scene being a great example!) and like so many of Thomas Pynchon's period pieces, the zeitgeist is captured and rather than held hostage, it's interviewed by the most loyal writer to report on any subject from subterranean geek bars to foot-fetishists. The novel's Reviewers are already downplaying the story. It's not so much about Maxine getting a grip with history's recent downhill tumble, but how her line of work has brought her face to face with it, and with classic Pynchon leading us to think about what events connect to whom? And who should truly be held accountable? Might Maxine learn who? You should totally read it and find out!

Pynchon's encyclopedic knowledge is on full display in Bleeding Edge. And his conspiracy theories (what some would have called paranoid delusions only a few months ago) appear to be much closer to reality given the recent revelations about the NSA's extensive data, courtesy of Edward Snowden. Many of the reader reviews seem to be in thrall to Pynchon and not seeing the shortcomings in this novel. The characters aren't credible and by the end of the novel I was completely "over" the avalanche of descriptors which were initially amusing but eventually annoying. And heaven help any reader who isn't completely familiar with NYC and the Upper West Side.

Long time Pynchon fan, but what can I say. Sure he's older, so am I. The flashes of brilliance in this book was like mining for gold, lots of sand to sift before there's any reward. I was really disappointed in an effort that was years in production. Why he chose deep web as the back drop for the story, who knows? I just plain got tired of the story. In the past, I have found his phrasing and content so good I didn't want to miss a word. In this outing I found myself glossing over half pages because they were boring. Still worth a read (library). If you are from New York the book probably gets 3 1/2 stars, never been to New york 2 1/2 stars

The new Thomas Pynchon novel is, by turns, dazzling, startling, grim, hilarious and, always, brilliant. It is also unreadable in many senses of the term. It does have a chronological plot (from the months before 9/11 to a period a few months after) and it does have themes. It has a protagonist--Maxine Tarnow--a digital-age fraud investigator; it does have what appear to be murders and it does have a villain, an entrepreneur named Gabriel Ice, who may just be a greedy monster and who may also have links with the perpetrators of 9/11. It also has a setting--Silicon Alley New York and, principally, what Pynchon terms the yup west side.

There are also many other characters, some of them memorable, but their numbers and voices are often difficult to follow. We must stop and remind ourselves who is actually speaking; then we must flip back and remind ourselves who this particular speaking character is. The novel is, basically, a slice-of-life story that concentrates on the sounds, feel, language and practices of a small historical period, but one whose reach obviously extends to the present day. The subject, as so often in Pynchon, is not so much Maxine's discrete experience of that world as the world itself, the world in which she lives and moves and tries to experience her being. That world is often a kind of dreamscape and many of her impressions of it are revealed in actual dreams. As she moves through it, Pynchon creates set pieces and songs to both reify it and undergird its evanescence. It is a world in which irony is the default position and the individual mind is marked by the incursions and affronts of omnipresent technology and the constant, sometimes reassuring eruptions of popular culture. It thus looks like and feels like your basic Pynchon novel, set in the Pynchon universe, where one is by turns racked with paranoia and relieved by slapstick humor and brilliant wit.

You read it like a (very secular) bible; the individual sections bring epiphanies and insights, but the sections do not always appear to cohere. Reading it is like undergoing one of Maxine's dreams. You see, hear and feel what this world is like, but you are immersed in it and you are denied the distance and perspective points which you would find in a traditional novel. As such, the novel risks succumbing to what Yvor Winters called the `imitative fallacy'. You should not, e.g., represent the confusions and contradictions of the world you are representing by being confusing.

Bottom line: Bleeding Edge is not as accessible as The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland or Inherent Vice. It feels like a mature Lot 49, in that the stakes are higher, the novel is about four times longer and it concerns the quest of a generally attractive female protagonist, seeking to understand the plots and connections which hover beneath a bizarre, massively-interconnected world. It is not as towering an achievement as Gravity's Rainbow. The set pieces are largely brief and, hence, not as memorable as those in other novels of Pynchon's, but many of the songs are up to his highest standards. For Pynchon devotees it is a must-read. For general readers it is a memorable, impressive example of the imaginative reach of our greatest living art novelist, a novelist continually tempted by the attractions of genre fiction.

I do not believe that you read this book for the plot, but if you wish to be anchored to a greater degree than the novel would seem to permit, there is a very helpful plot summary in Albert Rolls' review: [...]

There's conspiracies and there's times when they're actually out to get you, it's just that you define "you" a little bit too narrowly and that makes it a little bit harder to get out of the way.

Reviewing Pynchon is always tricky, because you want to go in expecting another "Gravity's Rainbow" when the reality is most writers don't have one book half that good in them, let alone two. Yet he's been kind of on a roll lately, becoming comparatively hyperactive in his release schedule. While Pynchon novels used to be as rare as that bus you still managed to catch even though you were two minutes late, since 2006 we've have three novels from him, one of which was big enough to fit four novels inside of it. As reticent as he is in public life, in the written medium he's become positively loquacious.

One can be of two minds about this kind of thing. On the one hand, I'd rather have momentous, life-changing works of literature every ten to fifteen years, but I do enjoy his novels so much I don't mind having a steady trickle of what seem to be minor works coming out every few years. Not everything needs to be a brick. "Inherent Vice", his last work, almost came across as Pynchon attempting to do a beach read, all his usual themes packaged inside a story that could be described as "breezy" without too much shuddering.

Now we have this work, longer than "Inherent Vice" but still not large enough to knock someone out if used as a weapon. It's shaped to be a minor work, as if we expect him to be able to cover anything truly weighty in less than five hundred pages but the more you burrow inside of it the more it starts to coil inside you, and the more it causes an undefined ache. Outside of "Gravity's Rainbow" and parts of "Mason and Dixon", this is the Pynchon novel that hit me the most emotionally, and it's startling how offhandedly he can snap a sentence in such a way that it causes a thin line of blood to form itself across the skin, with a stinging you don't feel until much later.

Like most Pynchon novels, it's about the plot and at the same time has nothing to do with the plot. Maxine is a formerly licensed fraud investigator that still does work under the radar in the months before the September 11th attacks in NYC. A friend alerts her to some strange happenings that are going on at a computer company, where money seems to be funneled into odd places, perhaps even to foreign countries, although she can't figure out what the purpose might be. From there Maxine starts to engage in side trails and rambling avenues, getting involved in her own cases but always circling back to the central case of Gabriel Ice and what his purpose might be. Then the World Trade Center comes down and suddenly everything becomes true in the worst way.

The case hardly seems important as an evocation of the times, and Pynchon finely details his version of the wacky underbelly that existed in NYC in the months that followed the dot-com crash, when we were convinced that it was the worst thing that could happen to us ever. Those months come across as innocent times, even though no one saw it that way at the time, with obsessions and concerns that were only important in the context surrounding it, a time when safety couldn't be guaranteed but could be relatively assured. The computer programmers and the nascent Internet, the corruption and the conspiracies, the slow encroaching of commercialism into what was previously an undiscovered and pristine country, it emerges as a question that wasn't asked and never deserved an answer and in the early portions of the novel it feels like Maxine could roam around these rabbit trails forever, discovering contradictions and solving mysteries via process of elimination, moving in circles with the rest of the eccentrics that she continually runs into. It's stasis as illusion, the background that moves with you as you move down the road so you're aware of the sensation of movement but don't feel that you're going anywhere. All the frivolities, all the failed millionaires and stunted plans, it all feels like a distraction from the looming black cloud that lies just ahead, even as the scenery gets into your eyes and blinds you with a whirling false hope. Meanwhile there's that film of strange men on a rooftop, watching an airplane and tracking it with a Stinger missile. It seems like the kind of thing that Nostradamus once saw, a vision of the future so far ahead that it makes no literal sense, the context is too removed. The language doesn't exist for it yet, except in the mouths of madmen who nobody believes anyway. The virtual world takes shape but not as an escape or an alternate, but just another way to go down.

When the September 11th attacks hit, it's like a depth charge inside space, silent and warping the topography of everything it comes into contact with. You can be uptown in NYC and not realize the world ended downtown, but still feel the ripples. It changes the shape slightly of everyone inside the novel and if they were keys then suddenly they don't fit the locks they used to anymore. For once having a cast of quirky characters with oddball names works in the book's favor, because it feels like these people are operating on the margins, children engaged in playtime when suddenly real life thrusts itself without warning into their little playground, and then it's a matter of figuring out how to stay out of the way, something done with increasing difficulty as the events start to take over everything. An odd sense of magical realism runs over the early portions of the story, with the usual setpieces and acronyms, those old paranoid concerns and tongue in cheek way of describing them, like how you act all flippant to hide how scared you really are. A fellow like Marvin, a delivery man who at random brings exactly what you need, fits right inside the internal logic of this place. Until it all becomes inverted.

If not for Maxine, the book would probably feel scattershot despite its narrower focus. It moves from scene to scene and concern to concern with a skittering abandon, the gathering of events never building to something smothering and overwhelming, more like dots that light up on a map every time you make an important point, here and here and here. But Maxine holds it all together, and while Pynchon will probably never create a person who could exist in real life, she exists well enough here, someone well attuned to this world but still capable of being surprised and horrified by it. By grounding her and having the lens of the book viewed through her, he makes the rest of the cast more tolerable as for the most part they're collections of quirks and voices, so deep in their eccentricities that they fit perfectly into this world the same way that giraffes fit into their exhibit at the zoo. Sure, it looks like they belong, but from the outside you can tell it's not real life. Maxine's concerns and foibles, her love for her children, her mixed feelings over her ex-husband, her steady navigation of a world that won't stop changing, winds up bridging the gap between the world that we live in now and the world that we once knew, that many of us used to inhabit.

Often he gets the emotional tone of things right, just in a sideways fashion. The reactions of the characters to the tragedies are often oblique, but still pitched to ache. He catches the overarching weight of new loss to a city, a kind of grease that oozes down into the smallest cracks. His gift for description is as intact as always and while the dense layers of foreboding prose that used to accent tomes like "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Against the Day" are mostly absent here except in short bursts, their arrival can catch you by surprise, as he delineates a formless and grasping sadness with an exact eye toward the margins, the receding of a shore that was never fully mapped before we had to abandon it. His precision can still startle, there's a moment where he describes what it looks like inside a subway when another subway parallels you on the next track that exactly captures that ghostly feeling of watching another world press up against your own without touching.

But what he gets most right, and what made the novel work for me on a level beyond following the bouncing ball of conspiracies, is how he describes the rapid and invisible changes that overtook us in a relatively short period of time, the erosion of a carefree sensibility, the contented feeling that with the Y2K crisis passed and the dot-com burst floundering into recovery, nothing bad could happen again. He finds the Internet before it was a place for advertisements and cat videos and watches it takes the first steps toward a warping into its own inevitability. How our connections only leave us more isolated, even if isolation is the only way to reach back into lost times. The people here have become relics in their own time and perhaps that's a reflection of how we might feel, thirteen years into a century that feels like a work in progress that doesn't care at all about our input.

Maybe it's my familiarity with the events. I'm old enough to have conscious memory of these years (being in my twenties then) and living in New Jersey I was close enough to see what was missing without the horror penetrating too deeply. I don't know how people even more tangential or with no emotional connection to these years will feel about any of this. Maybe the book is just a collection of wacky moments with a nod toward a stumbling sense of doom, and its depiction of the corrosion of what little was left of our innocence is all in my head. Maybe. I'm not really a nostalgic person, or never saw myself as one, and if I ever was it was for times that I didn't live in, not for any notion of my squandered younger days. Yet Pynchon seems to understand that something once seen cannot be unseen, but seems to suggest at the very end that the memory of once what was isn't the worst result. Instead it's the sight of children perfectly adapted to this new world already, and it's both hopeful to know and sad to see at the same time, and his ability to capture that broken feeling of loss, the looking on the bright side through holes in the wall in only a handful of lines is what makes this more than a minor work for me. Like trying to describe how it feels to have tears that were never shed, it's something you can't possibly know until it's been inhabited completely.

On September 17, I rushed to grab Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, but I needed two full weeks to finish it. Maybe blame it on the fact that I started a new video game, but I will honestly say that this newest novel by one of the most acclaimed living writers in our country didn't grip my attention the way I thought it would. Bleeding Edge is a story of mystery and intrigue surrounding tech startups in New York City during the summer and fall of 2001. Yes, it's a 9/11 book.

These days, I give props to any author with the steely enough loins to tackle the subject of 9/11, and in this case I think Pynchon does a fairly decent job of it. The reason why is Pynchon's myriad of Pynchonesque characters: Horst, the ex-husband obsessed with biopics; Driscoll, the Zuma-drinking programmer and Jennifer Anniston look-alike; Reg, the documentary filmmaker who captures the wrong thing at the wrong time; Igor, the former Spetsnav operative with a heart and an obsession with quality ice cream; March, the left wing prophet/oracle; Mr. Ice, the mostly evil startup-exec-turned-billionaire; a host of questionable venture capitalists; and, of course, Maxine herself, the fast-talking, criminal-but-moral, Jewish fraud investigator. Although, maybe Pynchon goes a little over the top with his characterization

Read the rest of the review here: [...]

Reading Pynchon is at once a literary adventure full of neologisms, bizarre images and strange characters with evocative if implausible names and a test of one's cognitive abilities. Can you keep track of the concepts and themes which might be serious and provocative while following a zany plot and a myriad of characters? More accessible than Gravity's Rainbow and as much fun as his west coast detective story, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge is well worth the effort it sometimes takes to appreciate the Joycean flights of creative dialog transcription that permeate the book and supply a lot of the humor. So what if the deeper insights, assuming there are any, seem to get lost in all the momentum of the byzantine plot. There's genius here even if the result is a bemused "what the heck" feeling when you reach the end.

I hadn't read anything by Thomas Pynchon in quite a while. I'm glad I chose this novel as a re-entry point. As usual, his writing is dense with detail and ideas. It's not a book you can pick-up and put down and read slowly. You have to dive in a just keep going. I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys good writing and has time to sit down and concentrate on it. You'll find the experience rewarding and enjoyable. The book is quite funny. Aside from the snappy dialogue, one of the funniest aspects is its setting in the recent "high-tech" past as you realize how many "bleeding edge" technologies have gone the way of the dodo in just the last few years.

For all the hip jargon and smart dialog, the fast read this book was just didn't say anything to me. It was filled with political and cultural platitudes. I also didn't care for the main character, nor for any of the other people moving in and out of her world. I agree with the reviewer that said that the author just couldn't pull off writing from a woman's perspective- the prose was emasculated, sometimes half funny caricature. Basically I don't believe in stories or story telling, whether it be of the detective or mystery genre, or sci-fi, or any of those that use swanky metaphor that serves up the world we inhabit as food from a Chinese restaurant- filling but with an unrewarding aftertaste, like processed food cuisine. Is this 21st century lit.? Or some version of 1950's cool transformed into 2001 future history writing? Can't this guy write anything new and different? Hey, I liked The Recognitions( which I read just before this book), Naked Singularity, The Pale King. They have something new and different in them. This book doesn't.

I read fiction to become a better fiction writer. That's why I bought this book. Pynchon is touted as a great; a literary hero to readers and writers. Yet, this book did not keep my interest because of its stale and too familiar references, fractured sentences seemingly going nowhere, and vocabulary peppered with Yiddish terms I did not understand. Is it the current writing? Did he once excel? Perhaps I am not smart enough to understand him. I accept that. Regardless, after reading one chapter I gave up. If a book does not hold my attention for its writing, its plotting, its clever use of language, simile and metaphor I can learn nothing from it.

Lighter fare than the middle books; Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon.. more like a return to Crying of Lot 49 with whimsy, satire, & humor. It's a great beach read. Pynchon seems less intimate with this theme (late nineties startups in NY) than, for instance, Vineland where actual events from late 60's/early 70's Humboldt Cnty show up in barely concealed form. The romantic visual/spatial conceit for programming and networks taken whole cloth from Gibson fails to ring true for late 90's computing which was/is still pretty funky and not graphically experiential. In any event, this book is like a good pinot grigio in summer, lite, refreshing, & undemanding.

What is the plot line in this edgy "fraud detective" mystery? Can't really say except that it was immensely entertaining to

try to figure out who did what to whom. Expect to be confused but not bored or bummed out. Manhattan is real and

surreal. Lots of geek-speak from 2001 Silicon Alley. Flawed characters from diverse ethnic groups who are treated with

respect and also held up to ridicule. No holds barred A&E citations. Be prepared to think, laugh and even sing!

In Gravity's Rainbow, the paragraph containing "Any gum. chum?" and ending with : turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable. Pynchon set himself then, for me ( and I'm older than him) way up among the giants (and I have - in my time - had dinner with John Steinbeck and shaken hands with Samuel Beckett,(and performed Lucky) and he (Pynchon) remains so.

After finishing this almost-500 page tome, still cannot determine if I actually liked the book or not. Similar to Gravity's Rainbow, in that the form of the book matched the theme. Difficult to follow at times, which I think was the point. If you like your stories dense, this book is for you.

It has been many moons since I picked up my first Thomas Pynchon book, THE CRYING OF LOT 49. I remember the experience being disorienting but strangely addictive --- the language swirling, the metaphors glaring, and the plot just barely hanging on to linearity --- and that's one of his more navigable novels. His latest, BLEEDING EDGE, similarly skirts the fuzzy boundary between perception and reality, with plenty of cultural references, campy dialogue, and political rants disguised as character musings thrown in for good measure. Was it just as disorienting to read? At times, you bet. Did it live up to my expectations? Not always. But the nearly 500-page behemoth is worth a gander, if only to glimpse inside the mind of the notoriously reclusive septuagenarian author who has been plugging away at his craft for more than 50 years.

If you've read any of the review coverage thus far, you'll know that BLEEDING EDGE is being billed as a 9/11 novel. But that's not the whole story. The fateful day doesn't happen until well over 300 pages have been flipped, and even then the actual events are given short shrift. A more accurate assessment reveals a New York, an America, a world in psychological and technological turmoil post dot-com explosion and implosion, a people enslaved by greed, power, control, and the obsessive urge to feel connected and "in the know" at all costs, despite feeling quite the opposite.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, there's a semblance of plot here to pay attention to. Maxine Tarnow --- our fearless protagonist and gun-slinging fraud examiner gone rogue --- is the "Yupper West Side" mom of two adolescent boys and on-again-off-again ex-wife of a philandering husband who really seems more like a dumb, devoted puppy dog than anything else. She's full of saucy one-liners (cue the camp mentioned previously: "Maxi, whatchyiz doin' tonight?" Maxi: "Masturbating to a movie on the Lifetime channel, Her Psychopathic Fiancé, I believe, why, what's it to you?"), and hot on the trail of one aptly named Gabriel Ice, the scummy brainchild behind a Silicon Alley computer security company accused of directly or indirectly financing the 9/11 attacks, and/or syphoning money to the Emirates, with or without knowledge of the CIA and Bush's cronies, or some combination of the three.

When she's not busy tracking Ice's scent (sort of), Maxine can be found sniffing around DeepArcher (pronounced "departure"), a virtual world where users can socialize, exchange information, and explore the dark, lurid corridors of the Internet, and how it either is or isn't connected to Promis, a data-sharing software program that "anytime it gets installed on a government computer anywhere in the world...anybody who happens to know about this backdoor can just slip in through it and make themselves at home...and all manner of secrets get compromised." Hello, NSA.

As with any Pynchon-sanctioned investigative caper, Maxine's approach to snooping isn't always clear. In fact, throughout BLEEDING EDGE she can often be found entangled (sometimes literally) in one far-flung compromising situation or another: undercover at a packed midtown karaoke bar, at a seedy strip joint called Joie de Beavre on MILF-night, facedown on the carpet of some musty motel screwing a potential suspect, and with a variety of colorful characters --- members of the Russian mob, a kinky foot fetishist who likes to wear condoms "just to have them on" --- some of whom wind up dead. Sure, these escapades might seem disconnected to the overall story, making it hard to follow and in need of a slash-and-burn edit. But does that matter? Pynchon never has been one to turn away from a tangent, no matter how outlandish it might get. In this case, the devil is indeed in the details.

At the end of the novel, it's anybody's guess (well, at least mine) if and how Maxine cracked the case(s), or if that's even the point. Let's remember, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and V. were far more challenging to read than this. A second or third time through might provide a few more clues. Yet, despite this nagging sense of befuddlement, there's plenty of classic Pynchon to cherry-pick and enjoy. Millennial and '90s references (Zima: "the bitch drink of the nineties"; the Furby and Beanie Baby crazes; Kozmo.com; Jennifer Anniston's hair) abound, as well as those born or bred New Yorkers will recognize (the Hamptons: "a glittering rat hole and summertime home to America's rich, famous, and a vast seasonal inflow of yup wannabees"; Dr. Zizmor: "that babyfaced dermatologist in the subway"; "a 24-hour Ukranian joint in the East Village" (i.e. Veselka); the original Loehman's on Fordham Road in the Bronx; the infamous toilet in the L.E.S. dive bar Welcome to the Johnsons). And let's not forget Pynchon's, shall we say, swollen prose: "The details ooze away as dawn light and the sounds of garbage trucks and jackhammers grow in the room, til she's left with a single image unwilling to fade, the federal penis, fierce red, predatory, and Maxine alone its prey."

All in all, BLEEDING EDGE is nothing if not a commentary on The State of Things disguised as a goofy potboiler.

Yes, it's sometimes riddled with conspiracy theories surrounding insider trading, corrupt politicians and the World Trade Center attacks, and sets its stage during a time when New York City and the rest of the country were draped in American flags and pumped full of patriotic sentiment and fear, while Islamic-looking people were carted off by the hundreds for being suspected terrorists.

Yes, it's sometimes a critique of our misunderstanding of and dependence on the Internet: "Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets...this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time...it was conceived in sin, the worst possible.... Call it freedom, it's based on control.... Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you've got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable."

And more often than not, take it or leave it, it's also a sobering message to Americans that still resonates today: We have always been "living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs...planet-wide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering."

Reviewed by Alexis Burling

I checked out the audiobook from my public library. The audiobook is narrated by Jeannie Berlin who is hands down the worst audiobook narrator I have ever listened too. Now that I looked at the case more closely, I noticed there is no review for the narrator, only the author. Guess that should have been a huge hint. It was hard to get beyond the annoying narrator but the text was too contrived. Glad the only money spent was time and gas to and from the library.

I have not previously read anything by Thomas Pynchon, but having heard so much about him I approached this book with a sense of awe, expecting something profound and literary. It was a bit of a let down. I didn't expect it to be so flippant. It seems that what Mr. Pynchon does best is poke fun at everything.
Set in New York, the story covers the year 2001, the year of the tragedy of the World Trade Center, but it's not really about that. It has more to do with the Internet, the www during that period when it transformed from a utilitarian tool, used mostly by academics, scientists, and the military, into an unruly monster, the new darling of dot.com entrepreneurs, gamers, the social media, and con artists, all of them with hopes of making it big. And the biggest scammer of them all, Gabriel Ice, appears herein with a finger in every pie.
Enter Maxine Tarnow, separated but not quite divorced, running her own little fraud investigation business on the Upper West side, even though she's lost her license. An old acquaintance, newly hired by Mr. Ice, feels uneasy about certain odd goings on at the firm and asks Maxine to investigate. And so she does, meeting one fantastic character after another as she scurries around New York keeping lunch dates. The Russian mob, the Italian mob, CIA operatives, the Mossad, kibbutzers, mercenaries, hackers, eco-warriors, family, friends, we meet them all. These are quirky characters, mysterious, and for the most part a little bit two-dimensional, and it is hard to separate the good guys from the bad. Mr. Pynchon makes them interesting and comical but does little to reveal their motivation. As for the old adage-Follow the money!-don't even try it here, the money trail just keeps going round and round.
There are a few issues with plausibility, but I suppose with Mr. Pynchon one doesn't concern oneself with such banalities. You wonder how Maxine Tarnow manages to keep her fragile agency afloat. There's a dearth of new clients, all she seems to be doing is favors for friends and family. And her methods aren't exactly legendary, she drops in at the office each morning to exchange quips with her secretary, then spends the rest of the day lunching, shopping, or visiting her shrink. The only time she actually finds herself in a position to investigate, she balks, turns tail, and runs. All her leads serendipitously pop up in conversation with various dining companions, like rabbits out of a hat, and the next day she is off on the trail, lunching again with some new and extraordinary character. Meanwhile, what exactly are all those Russians, Israelis, jihadists, mafiosi, CIA, mercenaries, and Greenpeace radicals really up to? I'm still not sure(And I did finish the book). I'm not even sure who the bad guy was!
It's all in fun, but the tongue in cheek delivery sometimes falls flat. There are some tasty morsels in here, a few brilliant passages and a handful of particularly memorable characters-a human bloodhound who's nose deserves it's own reality show comes to mind. But too much of it is caricature. I was expecting something a little more heavyweight. My mistake!

This rambling, discursive, novel of the Annus Horribilis of 2001 is grounded in the close friends and family of Maxine Loeffler Tarnow. The dot-com bubble has burst, the internet has grown beyond the ken of man, and the horizon is clouded by Bush era geo-politics, culminating in the tragedies of 9/11. Caught in these clashing currents, our heroine tries to understand who is at risk, and who is to blame. Her strength, and the strength of the novel, is her relationship to her two children, and sometimes husband.
For any parent with a young child growing up in this period, the desire to protect, and the need to adapt were primary. Pynchon himself was caught up in this struggle, living in New York, with a young child. How to explain the perversity of the world, while trying to preserve some semblance of the good country we grew up in. What skills and fears would she be safe in transferring to her children.
With the observational skill of a time traveler, Pynchon recreates the time and place where, in the face of thousands of deaths, we turned back to our families and our children, to rebuild the future. The vision of strong, humorous, loving family bonds are the glue that binds the disparate themes of the novel.

Many reviewers have focused on the paranoid mysterious parallel worlds that Maxine explores. Instead, it is the glowing portrait of family interactions, meals, school, and relationships which is the core of the story. Not altogether what one would expect from Pynchon, but that is what is consistently wonderful about his books...the unexpected.

You could call it gonzo if it stopped to have that much structure. A demolition derby of hyperbolic vignettes involving characters you will not, and will not want to, get to know.

If you know you like Pynchon, dig right in. If you're just thinking of dipping your toe in the water, the odds are good that sometime long before page 477 you'll recall that you have better things to do.

the reading by Jeannie Berlin is absolutely terrible! There is no change in the voice from one person to another, I could not tell who was saying what and could not finish the audio book. I was getting into the story line but the reader made it very difficult to follow.

I enjoyed the smart-ass NYC cynicism but the writing style requires getting into the inner world of the main character, a major investment. I finished it but I still don't know exactely wtf it was about.

Thomas Pynchon is a total genius. This is even better than Gravity's Rainbow. In fact, Gravity's Rainbow is to Bleeding Edge as Ulysses is to Finnegan's Wake.

OK, so that's a serious exaggeration. Forgive me. Still, my point is that this new book is just so unbelievably funny, condensed, concentrated, and packed with esoteric references (such that the few you do get scare you to death about how many you must be missing), that he deserves several MacArthur grants - though I hope he wouldn't need them because of previous royalties.

You just have to read this book. Living in NYC has nothing to do with it.

David Sidman, Linkstorm

P.S. Hooray for the Kindle Reader, where you can actually look up things that you never in a million years would have gotten.

It's sad really, because Pynchon was hypertext before there was hypertext. That jumped, crammed to the gills full of references style was like reading the chapters and the footnotes and the criticism all at once. These days, there's the Web. So we can say less, and let them click and look it up. But when Pynchon wrote, there was only paper and ink, and he made it work, giving you a shot so powerful you didn't think anything else was worth reading. Today. Well. It's sad, really.

I am a huge fan of Pynchon, and have loved all his other novels. I did enjoy Bleeding Edge, overall, but it falls incredibly flat next to Pynchon's other works. The aura of paranoia is addressed directly, rather than seeping into the world the characters inhabit, almost like Pynchon didn't have the patience to do it the "right" way, and preferred to just have the characters tell us how they (and we) should feel. Too much of the plot is explicated, Cliff-Notes style, at lunch dates in NYC. There are too many identical info-dumps via phone call. Too many characters are reduced to a single gimmick (Daytona, Marvin, Grisha and Misha, Ziggy and Otis, etc.) How many times do we need to be specifically told that Maxine has yenta inclinations bubbling to the surface? I think that Pynchon's skills just might be wasted on a novel primarily about a middle-aged mom and her shopping / romantic woes at the turn of the century. Just a hunch.

Anyways, there are some bright spots. At times, the hysterical pacing and collecting of social oddballs and underpeople really gets rolling, culminating in a pretty brilliant party (like it's 1999!) scene. There is one beautiful passage at the 65% mark that hits you out of nowhere, and is like stepping back for a moment into the heights of Gravity's Rainbow. The book is surprisingly tech-literate, with only one or two botched references that I could see. One or two of them were even outrageously clever. I wouldn't be surprised if Pynchon actually spent some time playing Time Crisis 2, and that's a pretty amusing image. Ultimately, Bleeding Edge can be funny and clever, at times, but doesn't even begin to approach the brilliance of Inherent Vice or The Crying of Lot 49, the books it is most likely to be set alongside.

Thomas Pynchon is famous for writing elegant, masterful, incomprehensible novels that English professors fawn over. Having only read The Crying of Lot 49, I was excited when the publication of this book was announced. Thought I'd give Pynchon the old college try again. Unfortunately, Bleeding Edge is a mess. Yes, it's masterfully written; it's teeming with delightful little passages where Pynchon flexes his literary muscles. Many have already been quoted in other reviews, but I particularly liked this one:

"As Thanksgiving approaches, the neighborhood, terrorist atrocities or whatever, reverts to its usual insufferable self, reaching a peak the night before Thanksgiving, when the streets and sidewalks are jammed solid with people who have come into town to view The Blowing Up Of The Balloons for the Macy's parade. Cops are everywhere, security is heavy. In front of every eatery, there are lines out the door. Places you can usually step inside, order a pizza to go, and wait no more than the time it takes to bake it are running at least an hour behind. Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement - colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism "Excuse me."

That's great stuff - I love the imagery. And that's the thing, this book is jammed with passages written so deftly that you can truly feel, hear, smell, and see all the details of the scene.

The problem is, there is nothing to tie these passages together. The plot is a contrived murder mystery/sci-fi thriller, and I'm not sure even Pynchon knew where he was going with it or what he was talking about. He builds some genuine tension, eventually, but the book ends with a massive whimper. At the risk of giving too much away, the reader waits patiently for 477 pages for the final showdown between the two main characters, and is left sorely disappointed.

I think the problem is mainly that Pynchon was too clever by half. There are two major motifs at work: descriptions of neurotic Jewish-American tendencies, and ham-fisted references to 90s pop culture. Both themes are far too prevalent and overdone. Pynchon also spends a great deal of time venting about the Bush administration and all but pins the 9/11 attacks on Dick Cheney. In other words, it got tiring quickly. (Pynchon also gives a shoutout to Bernie Madoff, in which the main character correctly guesses that Madoff is actually running a massive Ponzi scheme. Hindsight is 20/20, but it is also a major plot device in this book.)

At the end of the day, this book was really just a waste of time. If it was written by Robert Galbraith instead of Thomas Pynchon, it would have came and went as quietly and its own climax and conclusion... and then Pynchon would have had to own up to it just to create some publicity and sell copies.

I made several running starts trying to find the book of interest, being Pynchon, and finally powered my way through it. Even the final 20 pages was a chore as I didn't care about anyone in the book. Worse, the book promises an interesting plot and interesting observations about financial fraud and 9/11 but rambles on without much hint of either. Few lifts from the language, events are nearly incoherent; not a good read.

I hear good things about this book but don't buy the Audible version. The narrator sounds like a a 90 year old lady who can't read very well. I actually thought it was a joke a first or that the person was doing a character but it wasn't a joke. I have no idea what this book is about because I really couldn't get passed the voice. It was soooo bad. I have never returned a book because of the sound of the narrators voice but this was miserable.

I'm a new Pynchon fan --
I really like his writing - I get the concept - the message - but it is work becuz it is very dense--

I got the audiobook and it really eased me into the book -
Jeannie Berlin reads at a pace I can follow and retain what I've heard --
When I get lost in the text I go back to the audiobook and it has been a great crutch for me -
I've read some of the criticism about the audio book - but I must say - I work in the Audio field and whoever recorded her - did her no favor - the mix is really bad and did her no favor...

Bernice Franklin

I found this book to be insufferable. The plot is tough to follow because the writer does a terrible job letting the reader know where anything is taking place and who is saying any dialog. The humor is terrible.

Readers who may have put aside or put off Pynchon might begin here, and then drift backwards into his back catalog. He combines casual commentary on mores with clever asides about first-person mom-approved shooter games, nasal forensics, IKEA, foot fetishes, and a strip club named Joie de Beavre. He movingly evokes a Jersey landfill and uptown Halloween. His rapid-fire patter playfully taps into how we talk and think, encouraging reflection, as well as reaction. This story begins the first day of spring, 2001.

Manhattan during an "Eternal September" season lasting from spring to fall foreshadows what we know follows. Decertified, now rogue, fraud examiner Maxine Tarnow investigates bookkeeping by hashslingrz. Claiming to be a computer security firm, it's a shadowy entity exerting pull over dot.commers. Maxine chats up a few, hustlers for venture capital after the recent start-up downturn. A similar protagonist enlivens Inherent Vice (also reviewed; I reviewed an advance copy of BE): a gumshoe guides us, an everyday sort pursues corruption.

But Maxine's not the caricature Doc Sportello was. Maxine's ambitions to uncover the truth, as with Sportello's, spark the presiding spirit of each cusp of a new decade. Dreamers burst into a scene, eager to improve it. Con artists and charlatans rush past. Cynical tycoons jostle for power. It's a new take on the old threat--the corporate and banker "jocks" push aside the idealistic "nerds"--as Doc found on the West Coast, Maxine will back East.

Amidst a divorce from her ex-, she can arrive at the office to open her stash of Pinot E-Grigio. Tipped off by contact Reg Despard about hashslingrz, Maxine jumps at the chance to expose them. Is she afraid? "Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much?" Like many characters, not limited to her hapless pal Vryva McElmo (a trademark Pynchonism, these satirical names) from California, Maxine has a tic of raising the inflection of her voice within many sentences.

Pynchon notices East Coast-West Coast markers; after three novels set largely along the Pacific, this move from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley demonstrates his knack at blending regionalisms into his America, a place nearly but not yet homogenized. At the "bleeding edge", Stanford hackers capitalize on a program that erases its entry points in a chain of packets. "No proven use, high-risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with." By the millennium, as in so many boom times, the pioneers have staked the best cyber claims.

These pioneers design "a virtual sanctuary to escape from the many varieties of real world discomfort. A grand-scale model for the afflicted, a destination reachable by virtual midnight express from anyplace with a keyboard." The result, "DeepArcher," offers wired departure.

But it's not smooth sailing. In one prescient glimpse, TWA Flight 800, blown out of the 1996 sky over Long Island Sound, suggests a currently simmering conspiracy at the nearby Montauk Project. Not all such government schemes are "warm and comforting", where our wish to see bad guys get theirs comes to pass. So warns March Kelleher. Her son-in-law, billionaire Gabriel Ice, runs hashslingrz. She hints to Maxine: "If you were doing something in secret and didn't want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?"

Naturally, such a mystery means that fewer plot points can be divulged from about halfway into a contemporary version of Bluebeard's Castle. Here the heroine, despite the threat, enters a fortress, by a tunnel into the "terminal moraine". Superficially, urban myths get dismissed, as Cold War vigilance seems a dusty relic. Beneath, servers stretch. Within, servants to a new world order seek control.

"Presently they're linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms." What Maxine and her guides reveal shunts away from the crowds and, as with so much of Pynchon's fiction, near an abyss his protagonists seek.

Space looms, and the open space of The Crying of Lot 49, a generation later, finds Pynchon pursuing a last frontier, a domesticated locale as much as a cyber realm. Maxine races ahead of (or after) tamers who seek to subdivide it and fill it full of conformity. It's "down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyber-thugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined..." Those last modifiers repeat Pynchon's wonder: he shares awe through his pilgrim Maxine. She's one of us.

Maxine's ties to her family and friends, keeping her sane during her pursuit, enrich the compassion in this novel. Pynchon keeps his humor abundant, but he tempers it, in this look back at our very recent national past, with serious contemplation of what we do when we log on. Ernie, her father, muses how the Internet was, as DARPAnet during the decade of Ike, "conceived in sin, the worst possible" to keep the U.S. military armed after a nuclear attack. He predicts how soon cellphones will tighten this surveillance leash around us, as "the rubes'll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future".

9/11 comes and goes, with neither irony nor sentimentality. Jingoism accompanies fear as cowed Americans beg for protection. The media's Cold War context christens the devastation as "Ground Zero". Coverage controls popular reaction. "The purpose is to get people cranked up a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless." Regression to the mean occurs: the security state looms. (Nobody calls the date "9/11" in this novel.) Maxine reflects how "11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood." Maxine, looking for clues, leaves our "meatworld" behind for an interior dimension: partly mapped and coded, partly codeless. A void stretches beyond her own imagination or, perhaps, even Pynchon's own.

Bleeding Edge floats around. Pynchon likes to fill his pages with imaginary songs. Conversations yammer on, as busy meals out fill Maxine's Filofax. Her modus operandi finds her schmoozing and prodding many fellow noshers, if less exaggerated than typical Pynchon figures, still recognizably odd, or plain annoying. Reminiscent of Don DeLillo's reactions to national security and personal insecurity, the scenes when Maxine enters DeepArcher display best its promising premise. "It should be just one more teen-sociopath video game, except it's not a shooter, so far anyway, there's no story line, no details about the destination, no manual to read, no cheat list. Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?"

Open-source expanses beckon, as if William Gibson's wired, arid, and wary realms re-boot for a feisty novice. Who turns out to be a Jewish mother-in-the-making rather than a cyberpunk. Then, the pace shifts as bodies blink out. True to the genre, false flags and red herrings distract us--and Maxine. Your patience may be tested, but it may be rewarded if you can handle another novel from this author famed for resisting closure. The ending (as common with Pynchon) emits not a bang but a whisper.

For fifty years, Pynchon's tales tell us, sinister or suspect specters manipulate our "meatworld". Bleeding Edge represents another (if partial) exposure of occluded, relentless, corroding forces constructing and constricting our virtual reality.

I'm on the first disc of 17 and the reader is so terribly annoying I'm going to have to stop. No book, no matter how good, is worth the pain to my ears from listening to this nasal, monotonous voice. This is the first time I have ever stopped listening to a book because of a reader's voice, and I listen to at least 10 a month, but this is torture. Maybe I'll get the hardcover and try again.

This waste of time is an insipid piece of pap without a cohesive plot, character development or intellectual value. There are so many references to Geek Speak and insider New York Jewish babble as to make it unreadable and incomprehensible to anyone living outside of the 5 boroughs.
Go for a walk, take up knitting. Do anything but try to read this book.....

I loved Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying Of Lot 49 and V. Great books but to me Mason &Dixon and Against The Day and his new book Bleeding Edge was just waste of time for me. It's probably just me and my taste in books has changed. After this book I will never buy one of his books again. I'm sure some people will like it. It's just not for me.

Jeannie Berlin reads like an 8-year old. All monotone. All characters done in the same droning voice. An annoying grating every-word-and-preposition-given-the-same-emphasis horrible voice. After 15 minutes I got a full refund back from Audible. You are welcome to listen to 18 hours of Jeannie Berlin. It's not the tone of the Jewish heroine that I object to. It is the amateurish reading technique. Read the bad performance review ratings starting to pile up on Audible. And the book has only been out one day. I will be reading the hardcover copy I ordered from the store instead.

I now have to buy the actual book and read it and try to get the narrator's voice out of my head. I opt for audio books because my free time is limited and I can listen while doing other things. This narrator not only has the worst voice I've ever heard but her reading and interpretation is HORRIBLE! HOR-RI-BLE! I couldn't even make it through the first chapter. I don't understand why anybody thought that was a good idea.

I started reading Bleeding Edge and had to stop. Then I started up again, and stopped. I soldiered on. Ach! No one is ever going to say Pynchon is a bad writer. Bleeding edge has some good enough writing, but the whole enterprise seems dull. Yes, there's the usual Pynchon cleverness, in this case, I think, in service to itself. This novel has the gravitas of a potato chip, i.e., there's more depth in any single paragraph of Joseph Conrad. All this snappy dialogue. For what? So Pynchon can demonstrate he's cool? He's as cool as a grape. What's his purpose? What's he up to?

I went back and picked up Gravity's Rainbow, just to see if it was me, not Pynchon, whose head was taking a wrong turn. Answer: it's Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is as good as it was years back. The writing crackles--it's connected to something larger than Pynchon's attempt to be cool--characters are interesting, the story moves, grabs you from the get-go with that terrific opening sentence. The writing in Bleeding Edge is no better than what Stephen King produces.

Fact is, Pynchon hasn't written a good book in ages--not that he needs to. A work like Gravity's Rainbow assures him a place in the Hall of Fame. But Vineland, Mason & Dixon (at least it was funny), Against the Day, and worst of all, Inherent Vice (absolutely awful) are all sub-par. Was it Pynchon who was stalking The Strokes? I'm pretty sure it was. He should take it up again; it's a better hobby than writing. Or maybe he can find another band to chase. I recommend My Morning Jacket.

I really, really tried to read this book, but gave up after the first 100 pages. I could not bear to read any more time-wasting pages that made absolutely no sense to me! This was a National Book Award Finalist 2013. What were they thinking?

Seriously, I've listened to 100's of audiobooks through the store's Audible.com over the years and this is the only time I have ever been unable to listen to a book because of the narrator. I only did 15 minutes and decided I'd rather chew on broken glass and experience Bleeding Edges of my gums instead. What a shame. This is Thomas Pynchon for God's sake. Maybe it's all part of a meta-pynchon-esque conspiratorial event? Who knows. Returned!

the book just came out and i read it already in 20 minutes. i couldnt believe what talent Thomas Pynchon had!! i love this page turner. I got thought it in roughly 20 minutes of buying it. Loved the mystery, the scenery he paints of Jersery and NYC! I will have to buy more book from this very talented author and keep him at the top of my list. Im wondering when the next book is going to come out. I hope soon.