Bleeding Edge
Thomas Pynchon
It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. 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. 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.
Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her licence got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mum - two 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 neighbourhood - till 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. 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. Foul play, of course.
With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling 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.
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. Who wants to know?
Product Details
About Thomas Pynchon
Reviews for Bleeding Edge
Stuart Kelly
Scotsman
It’s dense, complex and riotously, ridiculously funny.
Esquire
The looming shadow of 9/11 touches every page. Nonetheless, many of those pages are outrageously funny, others are sexy, touchingly domestic, satirical or deeply mysterious. All are brilliantly written in Pynchon’s characteristically revved-up, even slightly over-revved style – a joy to read… Swarms with amazing characters… Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.
Michael Dirda
Washington Post
Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, is the best and most surprising thing he’s written since those great books… The jokes in this novel, incidentally, are superb, with the comic tone perhaps a career high point.
Tim Martin
Telegraph
Part thriller, part detective story, it’s a vibrant portrait of a city on the cusp of change.
Sonia Juttla
Sunday Telegraph
[Pynchon’s] eighth novel is something of a return to form, and could well be his best since his comeback… Offers a winning heroine, scintillating screwball dialogue and a typical host of weird, zany or depraved characters, this time corralled into a tighter-than-usual plot.
John Dugdale
Sunday Times
Entropic in its plottery and joyously paranoid in its world view… My advice: read it, but don’t try to follow it. It’ll make you giddy.
John Sutherland
The Times
There’s plenty of space within the pattern for Pynchon’s trademark digressions…songs, terrible puns…and some magnificent set pieces.
Thomas Jones
Financial Times
Though Bleeding Edge doesn’t stint on leftish theorizing about far-right misdeeds, it also gives the sense that for the first time Pynchon is looking at things from a very great height, as a battle between toy soldiers.
Leo Robson
New Statesman
The new novel by the reclusive Pynchon is set in New York in 2001 and follows a fraud investigator who takes on more than she bargains for when she checks out a billionaire internet tycoon.
Mail on Sunday