![]() Like Pynchon's other primers on paranoia, "Bleeding Edge" could carry Milton's lines from "Paradise Lost" as an epigraph: "And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide. Like Ornette Coleman's riff on The Rite of Spring, it starts out strong, misplaces the melody amid some delightfully surreal noodling, and finally swans away in sweet, lingering diminuendo. His books include The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon. Now comes Bleeding Edge, a lovably scruffy comedy of remarriage, half-hidden behind the lopsided Groucho mask of Pynchon's second straight private-eye story. Thomas is a popular novelist and has a big name in top writers. He received the National Book Award for Gravitys Rainbow in 1974. Thomas Pynchon is the author of this novel. Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravitys Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. ![]() Events soon spiral out of control in Pynchonian fashion as she uncovers a (Byzantine, natch) conspiracy involving virtual reality, the Deep Web, the busted dotcom boom, shady Arabian capital outflows, the Russian mafia, government assassins and murder. Bleeding Edge is an amazing novel full of drama, fun, suspense, intelligence, and love. Maxine, a decertified fraud investigator with two precocious kids and a sort-of-ex named Horst, is investigating a computer firm called hashslingrz, run by the villainous Gabriel Ice. The series of skits and gags that passes for a plot in the new novel involves what Stanley Cavell has dubbed a comedy of remarriage, with Maxine Tarnow in the Katharine Hepburn role. Complaining about looseness in a Pynchon novel is like complaining about dialect in Faulkner, but it's one thing if his screw-the-plot meanderings eventually trace the floor-plan of a cathedral like "Gravity's Rainbow," and another if he's just cadging joints on the beach with a busted guitar strung across his back. "Bleeding Edge" is Pynchon's second wink-nudge detective story in a row, its mock-Chandler shenanigans uprooted from the Los Angeles of "Inherent Vice" (2009) to settle uncomfortably in the land of "yups," Jewish moms and people who use the verb "plotz." It's also his second book in a row that seems unnecessarily slapdash. Bleeding Edge, present themselves as worthy figures of study in Pynchon’s work, as representations of space that seek to establish boundaries or delineated property play an integral role in the authoritarian forces that seek to oppress the downtrodden, or those whom society views as the Other.
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