In 1974 I traded a friend my copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for her recently purchased paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. It was big book with a cool cover and a great blurb from Geoffrey Wolfe of the San Francisco Examiner on the back cover: “I've been turning pages day and night, watching my fingers go ink-black, bleeding from paper cuts, reading Gravity's Rainbow. Forests have gone to the blade to make paper for this novel. Don't mourn the trees; read the book.”
I read Gravity’s Rainbow and found it to be almost as challenging as Ulysses. But like Ulysses it was often funny and profound and thrilling. I became a Pynchon devotee. I read V and The Crying of Lot 49. Then I read them all again. Occasionally I would meet up with another acolyte. Our author, like other mystical beings, could not be photographed or interviewed. No one knew where or how he lived.
Pynchon didn’t publish another book for almost 20 years, but since 1990 he has published a new novel every five years or so. I have bought them all and read them with trepidation—could they possibly live up to my expectations? James Joyce never really came back down to earth after Ulysses—he took 20 years to write a final book that seemed to be just 700 pages of puns and wordplay, and then he died. No retreat there. But Pynchon has plied his trade, writing books that don’t always look like they were intended to be masterpieces, and has forced me to rethink this whole pedestal thing.
Pynchon’s books are not strongly plotted—the characters are full of passionate intensity, but we as readers are never really quite sure what they’re up to or where they’re headed. These books are not aerodynamic, they should not be able to stay in the air, and yet most of them do, because they are weirdly buoyant, filled with a kind of vague mystery, an air of profundity that we can never quite track to its source. This essence is most powerful in early books like V and Gravity’s Rainbow. In the later books it is fainter and sometimes seems to be missing altogether. Against the Day in particular is disappointing, a great zeppelin of a book that never quite gets off the ground—the fact that it is in part about a troupe of balloon aerialists notwithstanding. Or, to use a different metaphor, the monster is stitched together and raised up onto the ramparts, but the vivifying lighting never strikes.
So, then, what of Bleeding Edge? Pynchon is now almost 80, so this may well be his last book (though I wouldn’t bet on it). It is in some ways a typical Pynchon novel: the slangy diction, the way the dialog is actually repartee, where everybody tends to speak in the same sort of hip, knowing way. At the center is Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her two sons. Maxine is vivid and likeable, but the large cast of friends, relations, clients, and professional contacts that move through the novel are generally less distinct. They appear and disappear, but by the time they reappear we’ve forgotten who they are. I discovered a wikipedia page that listed the characters and their roles, and for a while I would consult that whenever I encountered a name that I’d forgotten. A more careful reader might have made more of an effort to remember these names, but a more careful writer might have made more of an effort to introduce them in a way that would make them memorable—you know, backstory. Bleeding Edge is conspicuously lacking in chronological perspective.
After a while I stopped consulting the wikipedia list because I began to realize that it didn’t really matter that much where the various characters fit into the plot. The action would continue, hints would be dropped, conspiracies suggested, and the book was no less enjoyable because I couldn’t remember who Heidi was, or how Misha and Grisha were connected to Rocky Slagiatt.
The key thing is that Bleeding Edge *is* enjoyable. Characters may come and go like guests on a talk show, but it’s the best talk show you’ve ever seen—so what if you can’t quite place most of them? The book is set is 2001/2, in the months before and just after the 9/11 disaster. It is positively awash in pop culture references, cemented into its time and place. Just within a few pages I encountered references to Jennifer Aniston, Ace Ventura, and Tiger Woods; Pynchon even essays a Christopher Walken impression:
Maxine is drawn to the spare beroom by a voice from the TV set there, speaking with a graceful derangement of emphasis, almost familiar—“I respect your…experience and intimacy with the course but…I think for this hole a…five-iron would be…inappropriate…” and sure enough, here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story.
One of the running jokes in the book is the offerings of a cable channel that shows only ridiculous and implausible biopics, including The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski, or Leonardo Di Caprio in The Fatty Arbuckle Story. Pynchon has always had a zany sense of humor, but it’s intriguiging to see it aimed at our zeitgeist—or rather at the 2001 edition of our zeitgeist. Strange that an author who works so hard to stay out of the glare of popular culture should be so utterly familiar with it. It’s as though he is taunting us in some way—“You can’t see me, but I can sure see you.”
Pynchon directs assorted satirical barbs at the cultural pretentions of upper-middle class New Yorkers. But he also paints the landscape in loving detail—if Maxine visits a restaurant, we read in a digression that is is a vestige of a grittier, 1970s New York, and then get to read about several other establishments of similar vintage that are no longer around. As a one-time New Yorker, I loved these details—yes, 72nd and Broadway is indeed the most dangerous intersection in the city. Pynchon may not be making himself available in the flesh to answer our questions, but Bleeding Edge is a kind of confession of love for the city where he has lived for the past couple of decades. It memorializes the place, even as it deplores its surrender to money and corporate homogenization.
Somewhat less persuasive is Pynchon’s depiction of the software industry. This is not for lack of effort:
According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonmous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.
“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”
Uh, OK. Whatever. There is much in a similar vein about cryptography, and I would not dare to challenge the author’s ability to grasp the nuances of this field. As someone who has made his living as a technical writer for the past couple of decades, I tend to see the software industry from a less glamorous perspective—keeping a mundane piece of business software working correctly requires endless hours of tedious labor by hundreds of people. I can’t blame Pynchon for trying to make software seem more glamorous, but nor can I feel the same jolt of recognition and surprise that I feel when I read his descriptions of life in NYC.
Pynchon depicts “the deep web” as some sort of alternate universe, a dreamspace of infinite possibilities. It’s “cyberspace” circa 1992, a hypothetical utopia that you don’t really hear that much about anymore. The web most of us know in 2014 is a alternately a realm of commerce and the place where privacy dies. One name that does not appear anywhere in Bleeding Edge is google—the book is set in the instant before that transformation occurred. So perhaps this is an historical novel after all.
I don’t imaging anyone would ever call Bleeding Edge a great book—I wouldn’t in any case. But it’s a convivial book and a warm one. To bring Ulysses into the discussion again, it’s a bit reminiscent of the last three chapters of that book, the Nostos, which is Greek for homecoming. At the center of both books is a family reunited—in Bleeding Edge, Maxine’s wandering husband Horst is gradually moving back into her home during the course of the novel. We know, somehow, that we are closer to the author than we have ever been before. We feel his contentedness along with his rage and his despair. In spite of all the darker forces at work, Bleeding Edge is a celebration.
