![]() 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. It soon becomes clear that everybody’s pretending for tonight that they’re still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year’s dreaded Y2K, now safely history, but according to this consensual delusion not quite upon them yet, with all here remaining freeze-framed back at the Cinderella moment of midnight of the millennium when in the next nanosecond the world’s computers will fail to increment the year correctly and bring down the Apocalypse.” Take this description of a Y2K-themed party on the night of September 10, in which an insta-nostalgic celebration of an avoided disaster plays as unknowing prologue to a fast-approaching one: “The theme of the gathering, officially ‘1999,’ has a darker subtext of Denial. ![]() But then again, as Publishers Weekly aptly puts it, “reading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex,” and where *Bleeding Edge *really shines is in its evocation of the age and its sense of collapse. The plot is picaresque and fun, but not particularly essential and occasionally exhausting. Meanwhile, she’s getting back together with her ex-husband while carrying on dalliances with a government assassin and a foot fetishist, and a videographer-friend of hers has weird footage of what appears to be some kind of 9/11 precursor, and there’s some guy with an insanely accurate sense of smell. ![]() Private investigator Maxine Tarnow starts sniffing around a web company whose wunderprick CEO has been snapping up cheap fiber and whose partner is mysteriously murdered. In structure, it’s another shaggy-dog detective story, in the style of Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice. Bleeding Edge is set in Silicon Alley in 2001, after the dot-com collapse and through the events of September 11 (referred to here as “11 September”). ![]() The second event is this month’s publication of Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s ninth book and his first to take on the Internet as a major subject. Is the NSA merely engaged in routine police surveillance? Have devilish usurpers turned what was once a revolutionary platform for free expression - like Lot 49’s Trystero System - into a system of surreptitious control? Or, as Bruce Sterling chillingly argues, was that the point all along? This is the Pynchonian mind state, always on the edge of confirming our most paranoid instincts, but without the comfort of knowing for sure. We know we are being watched, but we aren’t sure by whom, how much information they have, or how they are using it. The first was the aforementioned Snowden affair, which plunged the nation and the tech industry into the overheated confusion of Pynchon’s classic questers. That all changed in 2013, when two events firmly confirmed Pynchon’s relevance. Pynchon’s famous aversion to photographs and publicity once felt like a radical act of resistance, but no longer carries the same punch amidst our Warholian swirl of selfies and status updates. His shorter books, Vineland and *Inherent Vice, *are Lebowski-esque larks, meandering tales that treat urgency as a sin to be avoided at all costs. His last two major book - Mason & Dixon and *Against the Day *- are historical novels, linked to the present condition only by loose analogy. Pynchon is perhaps the only living writer who draws equal inspiration from Norbert Wiener and Rainer Marie Rilke, who has written both Boeing technical manuals and indie-rock liner notes it’s hard to imagine a novelist better suited for the Internet Age.īut over the last couple of decades, Pynchon's work has felt oddly out of step with the times he predicted. Way back in 1984, Pynchon wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review that foretold the rise of big data, the whip-cracking impact of the Long Tail, and the fragmenting of popular culture, all within the first two paragraphs. 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49 invokes the Trystero System, a WELL-like alternative communications network. As a Cornell undergraduate, he co-wrote a dystopian play that predicted the era of mobile computing. Edward Snowden, right? Sure, but also a major plotline in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.Ĭast your eyes back across the decades and it is amazing how prescient Pynchon’s writing has been. This realization prompts him to defect, joining a loosely-knit counterforce and launching a tragicomic transcontinental chase where he is pursued by vengeful American authorities across the globe. So how’s this for a story: A relatively low-level US military employee discovers that the government has secretly been collecting data on its own citizens and using it to predict the next enemy attack.
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