"The Washington Post"
"Brilliantly written... a joy to read... Bleeding Edge is totally
gonzo, totally wonderful. 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. 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
license 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 mom--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
neighborhood--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 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.
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?
"Slate.com"
"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... 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."
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