Pynchon’s obsession with conspiracies and the existence of systems too complicated to understand. The detective story genre concerns the finding of clues and the search for hidden designs, and its very form underscores Mr. Like most Pynchon books, “Bleeding Edge” uses the detective story as a flimsy armature on which to build a huge, teetering Rube Goldberg-esque narrative. The novel’s default mode is weirdly sophomoric in tone, much like its recently released trailer, which features a young man wearing novelty sunglasses and a T-shirt that reads, “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon,” wandering around Zabar’s on the Upper West Side and buying smoked salmon, which he later drapes over his face as a “natural exfoliant.”
11, “Bleeding Edge” is weirdly Pynchon Lite, not as breezy as his 2009 novel, “ Inherent Vice,” perhaps, but an uncomfortable hodgepodge of genres that vacillates among chick lit (with a heroine who visits an “emotherapist” and shops at Loehmann’s), the private-eye procedural and Tom Wolfe-ian satire, stopping now and then to dispense some nastier spoonfuls of existential nausea and terror. All the author’s familiar trademarks are here: a multitudinous cast with ditsy, Dickensian names shaggy-dog plotlines sprouting everywhere, like kudzu large heapings of coincidence and a plethora of jokes, ditties, dead-end digressions and trippy, playful asides about everything from Benford Curve anomalies to Beanie Babies to the mysteries of the “ Deep Web.”Īnd yet, for a novel concerned with Sept. The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details.
And he also addresses the other great contemporary subject - the Internet and its transformation of our world - that happens to mesh so completely with his enduring fascination with hidden connections, alternate realities and the plight of people caught up in the gears of a ravenous and gargantuan techno-political machine. In his latest novel, “Bleeding Edge,” Mr.
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