![]() The novel also depicts her personal response to those events, which involves her lavishing as much Jewish mother love as possible on her sons, her on-again-off-again husband Horst, and anyone else in the vicinity. Maxine attempts to find an answer to who might be responsible for the 9/11 conspiracy. The after-effects of the attacks dominate the final third of the novel. This initial technological narrative bleeds into a second narrative, in which the Deep Web and the tech companies each anticipate (in their own way) the September 11 terrorist attacks. But it also leads Maxine to an awareness of the Deep Web, a hidden part of the internet that, in 2001, is yet to be colonised by bots and spiders, pop-ups and surface crawlers – the electronic ephemera of capitalism, of which Pynchon is witheringly disdainful. This investigation reveals, in typical Pynchon style, much deeper conspiracies. The first half of Bleeding Edge follows her investigation into various tech companies and their half-hidden fraudulent activities. The detective figure is Maxine Tarnow, a New York City fraud investigator. It is a detective story, similar in method to The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and in apparent motivation to Inherent Vice (2009). Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day meddle with the formal boundaries of the novel Bleeding Edge is, for the most part, formally conventional. This is especially true of the text’s form. If, however, we want to consider Pynchon’s work as a whole, or his twenty-first century novels, we need to discard the influence that Gravity’s Rainbow holds over critical discourse.īleeding Edge is a novel in Pynchon’s other tradition, a tradition that runs counter to Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. McHale’s argument may well be of use if we are simply considering Gravity’s Rainbow. He is poking fun at the obsession with categorisation and the desire to identify the ‘bleeding edge’ of any new artistic movement. Pynchon attacks this type of academicism in Bleeding Edge, imagining an NYU professor running after a subversively inattentive film pirate, who ‘artistically’ zooms in and out of the films he illicitly records, to ask him if he ‘knew how far ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form he was working’. According to McHale, Pynchon is the progenitor of postmodernism and without him the category would hardly exist at all. Indicative of this troubling type of analysis is Brian McHale’s recent statement that Pynchon is not simply a contributor to the postmodern style, but its catalyst. They do not allow us to think clearly about his writing post- Gravity’s Rainbow, or his oeuvre in its entirety. I believe that the narratives and the interpretive assumptions that have come to surround Pynchon’s work are limiting. The narrative of Against the Day was so disjunctive that it made reading the text a supreme effort and one that some (many? most?) gave up on. The scope of that novel made it inevitable that some readers would hit, as a colleague of mine calls it, the ‘Pynchon wall’. Many readers, it is said, were frustrated with Against the Day (2006), set in the fin de siècle, Europe-centred, but with events taking place all over the world and a cast of characters in the hundreds. This period has also seen the emergence of a ‘public Pynchon’ who, along with appearances on The Simpsons (with a paper bag over his head), now narrates publicity videos and writes marketing material for his work. He has recently defied his slow-publishing reputation: the period from 1997 has seen the author at his most active since the 1960s and early 1970s. In many ways, this anticipation is a product of the author’s well-known aversion to publicity and the seventeen year silence between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland (1990).ĭespite the assumed power and marketability of the Pynchon name, however, it appears that the anticipation might be diminishing and that the number of readers waiting eagerly for the new Pynchon is dwindling. Each generates a sense of anticipation we ask ourselves whether the new Pynchon will approximate the mind-shattering impact that Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) had on readers and critics alike. ![]() There is a certain similarity of reaction, so the story goes, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel.
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