Bleeding Edge
By Thomas Pynchon (Penguin)
When discussing an author like Thomas Pynchon, a natural tendency arises to categorize the artist’s output in terms of weight, in both the metaphorical and strictly Euclidean senses. To wit: a gargantuan tome like Gravity’s Rainbow charts towards the high end on both, while the goofball antics of Inherent Vice’s stoner detective Doc Sportello rank towards both scales’ lower depths.
Bleeding Edge
By Thomas Pynchon (Penguin)
When discussing an author like Thomas Pynchon, a natural tendency arises to categorize the artist’s output in terms of weight, in both the metaphorical and strictly Euclidean senses. To wit: a gargantuan tome like Gravity’s Rainbow charts towards the high end on both, while the goofball antics of Inherent Vice’s stoner detective Doc Sportello rank towards both scales’ lower depths. The Crying of Lot 49, while very light physically, can be seen as much heavier, in, y’know, a Sportellian, like, sense, man. Pynchon’s latest volume, Bleeding Edge (which runs to 477 pages), hovers around the midway mark across the board.
Spanning the time from March 2001 until the following spring, Bleeding Edge examines the recent culture of tech-world profligacy (with all its requisite hands pinched by the lids of cookie jars), and the corollary military interest that follows advances in tech like lawyers in the wake of an ambulance. Our liaison into this world is fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow, a streetwise mother of two whose glib yenta tendencies and strong maternalism serve as the novel’s narrative, and occasionally moral, center. Pursuing a suspicious trail in some undercooked corporate books, she is drawn deeper and deeper into a world-wide web (in every sense) of deceit, conspiracy, concealment, and murder.
Unfortunately, Pynchon’s efforts seem to be at least partly in vain: a few minutes chasing conspiracy theories on Wikipedia yield far, far more disturbing allegations than anything Maxine is likely to turn up while investigating her perfidious dotcom boomers. The very real modern world of data mining, NSA surveillance, and rampant 9/11 conspiracies offers everything Pynchon can dream up and so much more–the book’s wild-eyed willingness to believe there’s some pyramid scheme behind every wrong visited on millennial America appears to be outdone by reality.
The major thematic touchstones–paranoia, eschatology, global fascism, Scooby Doo–are trademark Pynchon in the very best sense: if these elements were absent from Bleeding Edge, one might well wonder if one were holding a Pynchon at all. Missing, though, perhaps most notably, is the author’s talent for pursuing innumerable storylines, a gift for jumping through time, space, language, and sexual predilection, leaving the loose ends of characters’ narratives to trail off into static, a radio station fading out of range. In Bleeding Edge our eyes hover just over the back of Maxine’s head, and all loose ends get tied up more or less neatly by book’s end, which, given the author in question, ends up feeling somehow less fulfilling than the alternative.
On the whole, though Pynchon’s finely-tuned farcical sensibilities and abiding respect for all manner of punnery and wordplay would give any other writer a run for her money, the book reads like a rehashing of themes the author has already explored–specifically in 1990’s Vineland. And while the prescience of his subject matter appears at the surface to be spot on, Pynchon’s seeming reluctance to really delve into the sprawling underworlds that call the Internet their home ends up making Bleeding Edge weirdly lopsided and myopic, as though William Gibson were suddenly satisfied exploring DOS.
In the end, Pynchon’s own monumental achievements have left him with the herculean task of living up to them, leaving his readers in the distasteful position of the once-impressed professor who can tell when a student isn’t applying himself: “Yes, this is good, but I know you can do better.”
