government, with the implication, as Horst later will ponder, that all are bound up in the collapse of the Twin Towers. One track she follows leads to a genius billionaire and electronic concoctions that can scarcely be believed-but also, in a customarily loopy way, to organized crime, terrorism, big data and the U.S. Her estranged husband, apparently a decent enough sort, “to this day has enjoyed a nearly error-free history of knowing how certain commodities around the world will behave,” but Maxine has a keen sense of how data flows and from whom to whom.
#Pynchon bleeding edge code#
Maxine Tarnow is, on the face of it, just another working mom in the city, but in reality, after she’s packed her kids’ lunches and delivered them at school, she’s ferreting around with data cowboys and code monkeys, looking into various sorts of electronic fraud. Paranoia, that operative word in Pynchon’s world ever since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), is what one of his characters here calls “the garlic in life’s kitchen.” Well, there’s paranoia aplenty to be had in Pynchon’s sauté pan, served up in the dark era of the 9/11 attack, the dot-com meltdown and the Patriot Act. Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight.” (Jonathan Lethem) Wired magazine The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos through which he has framed the last half-century.Pynchon ( Inherent Vice, 2009, etc.) makes a much-anticipated return, and it’s trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes. Who wants to know? "If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for." The New York Times Book Review Exemplary dazzling and ludicrous. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.
#Pynchon bleeding edge plus#
She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead.
Otherwise, just your average working momtwo boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhoodtill Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown.
#Pynchon bleeding edge license#
She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethicscarry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accountswithout having too much guilt about any of it. Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.” (Michael Dirda) It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. The Washington Post ∻rilliantly written a joy to read Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful.
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