Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin, 2014, 477pp, trade paperback
A Review by Gene Stewart
This is the single best book about New York City and about 9/11, just as Pynchon is the best living writer.
In it, NYC is as much a character as anyone, with personality and moxie enough to stand up to the likes of Maxine Tarnow, independent fraud investigator, mom, separated wife, wild woman, and occasional noir detective type tougher than a Jewish Princess at a discount Gucci sale.
This being a Pynchon novel, everything is malleable depending on what reflection in which facet of paranoia, conspiracy, or just plain surreal real life you’re momentarily captivated by. This is not a novel to read if you want sweaty revelations about Who and Why and so forth, nor is it the book to change your life away from corporate America’s rat maze.
9/11 does not show up until page 316, for example, so it’s not a dissection of the angst that cast a pall over NYC after that series of events. This is a novel about NYC, and for hard core New Yorkers, 9/11 was just one of many speed bumps on the way to continual evolution. It’s not a book to read so you can understand the details of the conspiracy; who knows them?
It IS the book to read if you want to laugh, cry, and keep reading late into the night to see what more can possibly happen, impinge, or waft by in a could of hints, winks, and nudges to real people caught up in complicated, often baffling, always unresolved real life, which just keeps going.
Pynchon’s narrative voice matches NYC perfectly and reveals character even in descriptions, which are often simultaneously hilarious, appalling, and layered with references. As always, his insight is X-ray and his sarky asides laser, acid, or worse. He pegs everything his roving gaze touches on. Having pegged, that gaze moves on to penetrate everything else.
Maxine is fantastic, both grounded in family and in touch with her neighborhood basics while able to party the night away dressed like an uptown Shania Twain in pursuit of leads instead of song hooks. She packs heat, she knows what to do with it, and sex is definitely an option, now and again, depending.
It feels as if all of NYC somehow crams subway-wise into this novel. Incredible sense of place, astounding evocation of location, sensory overload at every turn. How NYC is that?
His narrative voice is as brilliant as anything James Joyce ever crafted. It is entirely of the city Pynchon calls his home without a trace of forced mimicry or false accent. Here is the first paragraph, two sentences not so simple but utterly correct as to time, place, and person:
“It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school. Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks, its on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?”
That is genius, delivering information telepathically while shoveling attitude and setting up plot, all elegantly in two sentences.
For those who dote on Pynchon’s vaunted vocabulary, fear not, there are words herein to send anyone to a dictionary, only to be delighted at further, deeper word-play than was suspected.
I cannot express how much I enjoyed this book. It is perhaps my favorite Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow, certainly a vault past the wonderful, ultimately mystical “other” detective mystery, Inherent Vice, which was West or Left Coast where this one is East Coast Deluxe.
How about tossing aside this Man Booker Prize snobbery and Stockholm Syndrome prejudice against Yanks and bestowing a Nobel Prize for Literature on Thomas Pynchon while he’s still around to say cool stuff about it?
Meanwhile, go discover his books and be elevated. Start with this one and you’ll immediately be immersed in the best writer’s most personal world.
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