![]() Tellingly, there’s even a tangle in the blurb: The neoliberal enforcer is Nicholas Windust (who uses a cattle prod to enforce his ideology on citizens of developing nations) the guy with “footwear issues” is Eric Outfield, a hacker and podophiliac. 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. ![]() I’ll lazily borrow from the jacket blurb to offer a smattering of those subplots: ![]() As is the case with any Pynchon, the gist isn’t the point-the subplots are the real point, those threads that tangle off into some other invisible tapestry, unrevealed to protagonist and reader alike. Not enough? Well…īleeding Edge is nearly 500 pages long and seems to have almost as many subplots-but the gist of the novel is that Maxine Tarnow, a now-unlicensed fraud examiner, undertakes a sprawling investigation that leads her to what may-or-may-not-be evidence of unidentified conspirators collaborating in some way to facilitate the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Reviews usually offer some kind of plot summary, right? Here’s a really short summary: Bleeding Edge is Pynchon’s New York novel, his 9/11 novel, his internet novel. Instead of doing a big list of links, images, and excerpts, this blog about Bleeding Edge will be my minor contribution. Folks online like to celebrate with something called Pynchon in Public Day, which this year, thanks to These Paranoid Times, has become Pynchon in Private Day. Today, is Thomas Ruggles Pynchon’s 83rd birthday. I’d jotted down a few notes as I was reading the book over the past two weeks, thinking about writing a review or an essay about the novel, but lately I seem to sit on such notes and never hatch them into anything real. I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s 2013 novel Bleeding Edge a few minutes before I started typing up this blog.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |