Bleeding Edge
By Thomas Pynchon
(Jonathan Cape, £20.00
stg, H/B)
America’s laureate of the 1960s (and pretty much everything
else before and since), Tom Pynchon’s new novel is set in New York, just after Silicon Alley’s (the East Coast’s grubby cousin of the West Coast’s Silicon
Valley) dot-com boom went bust, and moves on to encompass the events of September 11,
2001. In Pynchon’s world, naturally, these historical phenomena are not
unrelated.
Our heroine Maxine Tarnow, who bears
comparison with The Crying Of Lot 49’s
Oedipa Maas, is a working Mum running her own fraud investigation company, Tail
’Em And Nail ’Em (formerly Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em and Jail ’Em, but that was
judged too presumptuous). Something of a Rachel Weisz lookalike, Jewish
Maxine’s family consists of her opera-loving parents Ernie and Elaine, her two
sons in elementary school Ziggy and Otis, her estranged sister Brooke and her
ex-Mossad husband Avi, and last but not least her on-again-off-again,
not-as-ex-as-he-might-be-ex-husband Horst, a stolid but solid Midwesterner. A
‘big alexithymic lug’ according to best friend Heidi, a career academic with
tenure at City College’s Pop Culture Department, with whom Maxine has a Mary Tyler
Moore and Rhoda double act relationship (analogy mine): ‘At some point early in
their relationship, which has been forever, Maxine understood that she was not
the Princess here. Heidi wasn’t either, of course, but Heidi didn’t know that,
in fact she thought she was the
Princess and furthermore has come over the years to believe that Maxine is the
Princess’s slightly less attractive wacky
sidekick.’ But, hey, Rhoda got her own show, eventually.
As with every Pynchon novel, long or short,
there is a compendious cast of characters. A few among the many here are:
Gabriel Ice, CEO of hashslingrz, a computer security firm which may be
funneling money to Saudi Arabia; his wife Tallis, who is also daughter to
Maxine’s anarchist friend March Kelleher; ruthless neoliberal enforcer Nick
Windlust, with whom Maxine has a guilty fling; Xiomara, Nick’s Guatemalan
ex-‘child bride’ – the two women’s relationships with Windlust echo that of
Frenesi Gates with Brock Vond in Vineland,
the recurring Pynchon motif of hippie/liberal/lefty chicks secretly attracted
to (not so) clean-cut fascistic guys; and let’s not forget Maxine’s Buddhist
‘emotherapist’, Shawn: ‘Beaming at her with that vacant, perhaps only
Californian, the-Universe-is-a-joke-but-you-don’t-get-it smile which so often
drives her to un-Buddhist daydreams seething with rage. Maxine doesn’t want to
say “airhead” exactly, though she guesses if somebody put a tire gauge in his
ear it might read a couple psi below spec.’ Which begs the question: why does
she attend him? Then there’s Conkling Speedwell, a professional ‘nose’ obsessed
with Hitler’s aftershave (4711, fyi), born with an enhanced, canine-level sense
of smell – redolent of The Crying Of Lot
49’s Dr. Hilarius, who could make a face that rendered people insane. Oh,
and Lester Traipse is the embezzling programmer who gets murdered.
Lots of these characters interact through
chance Woody Allen-style Manhattan street-meets, and the book is, among many
other things, an askance love letter to New York, where by all accounts Pynchon
now resides (and, by extension, Long Island, Pynchon’s birth place). There’s a
nostalgic ode to sleazy old Times Square, before it was Disneyfied by Mayor
Gulliani, a philistine suburbanite. Amid the mayhem of documentary film makers,
nefarious computer programmers and hackers, Russian oligarchs and mobsters, the
pining for the heady days of the tech bubble – when you could be at a start-up
party every night of the week, and several on Thursdays – there is the ongoing
critique of ‘late capitalism as a pyramid racket on a global scale.’
While there is a palpable and amazing sense
of just how much cyberspace has moved on in the short time since the turn of
the century, when most of the online conveniences we take for granted today had
not even been invented, one thing that hasn’t changed is that the now 76-year-old
Pynchon’s attitude to sex remains resolutely casual and adolescent. There is,
of course, a school of thought which argues that sex should be causal (if not
always adolescent), but it can be difficult to credit that some of the female
characters here, Maxine included, let themselves get into the situations in
which they find themselves.
As ever, conspiracy is Pynchon’s major theme,
and here we have a Deepweb, accessible only to code breakers, while the rest of
us swim in the shallows of the surface web; and also the notion that certain
right wing elements had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks: ‘Is this all yet
another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and
begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel?’ Yet it all
feels more vague and amorphous this time around, which paradoxically only adds
to the foreboding and dread, and is also more reflective of the times we live
in. If you pitch conspiracy theories of history, at one
end of the scale, versus blind chance at the other, in many ways conspiracy is
more comforting. At least it means someone’s in charge, the hidden hand is just
not whose we thought it was, or whose we’d like it to be. But what if no one is
actually calling the shots, and it’s all just one big cosmic gamble and
free-for-all? Scary.
So,
we’re not getting another Mason &
Dixon or Against The Day
blockbuster here, and certainly not something as era-defining as Gravity’s Rainbow. A bit like Vineland, and even Inherent Vice, this is the kind of thing Pynchon can do in his
sleep. But it’s still better than what most writers who are wide-awake can
dream up. In its own (relatively modest) way, it sums up a historical period of
great turbulence and uncertainty just as much as the now canonical works of
this great American novelist once did.
This review will appear in due course in the Irish Sunday Independent, doubtless in a much truncated version.
