High Risks, High Rises
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
Jonathan Cape, 496pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780224099028
reviewed by Sara Veale
New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it.
So pens American crime writer Donald E. Westlake, whose words comprise the epigraph to Bleeding Edge, the latest installment in Thomas Pynchon’s varied and well-canvassed repertory. Revisiting the Big Apple as a setting for the first time since his 1963 debut, V, Pynchon heeds Westlake’s direction and employs the city as a facilitator of entropy, a purveyor of paranoia that serves to shroud rather than expose the myriad riddles it beholds.
Of course this isn’t any old New York City. Pynchon’s New York doesn’t hark to notions of Ellis Island egalitarianism or immigrants buoyed by the American Dream, nor does it invite friendly imagery of Broadway and yellow taxis and tourists outfitted in ‘I Heart NYC’ t-shirts. This is early 21st-century, pre-9/11 New York, Manhattan to be specific, where capitalism is creed, tech start-ups abound, yuppies have commandeered the majority of the borough’s neighbourhoods and ‘Disneyfied’ landmarks like Times Square suffer a ‘tightening Noose of Horror’ – a proliferation of ‘multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh!’
These stipulations aside, Pynchon doesn’t deny the city its trademark quirks; for all its stratification, his New York still brims with proudly brazen ‘New Yawkers’, loud-mouthed pedestrians who justly consider queue-jumping ‘a felony’ and deride ‘taking much longer than [one] has to’ as ‘a West Coast thing’. This bustling cityscape provides a neat foil to DeepArcher, a central plot feature that takes the form of a cryptic virtual panorama not unlike Second Life (albeit a beta version).
DeepArcher is ‘the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information’; it is boundless where New York is cramped, lawless in a way that its counterpart, with its omnipresent surveillance regimen, has long ceased to be. So integral is the cyberscape to the pervasive themes of paranoia and moral ambiguity that the novel takes its title from DeepArcher’s industrial classification: ‘what’s known as bleeding-edge technology… no proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with’.
The action centres around the investigative exploits of Maxine Tarnow, a Beretta-toting ‘Yupper West Side’ fraud sleuth who’s not above her own set of loose morals (in classic Pynchon fashion, she’s off the books, having had her certification yanked thanks to her ex-husband’s fishy financial dealings). When a tip prompts Maxine to nose around the accounts of hashslingrz, a computer-security firm improbably thriving in the midst of the dotcom crash wreckage, she starts to unlock door after door of encrypted information and soon becomes ensnared in a wild goose chase through the deepest recesses of the web, searching for links between the iniquitous individuals and sneaky transactions she confronts in her travails. As readers of his previous novels will know, Pynchon is partial to outlandish casts, and his latest doesn’t disappoint: among the gaggle of characters that make appearances are a hacker with a foot fetish, a dealer of FDA-denied Soviet-style ice cream, a professional ‘Nose’ fixated on Hitler’s signature cologne and a Jewish grandmother who doubles as a full-time conspiracy theorist.
New York’s gritty Silicon Alley features heavily, and Pynchon offers a glut of technical minutiae that goes a long way in capturing the zeitgeist of the post dotcom bubble tech industry, where online advertising is ‘still in its infancy’, and early 2000s geek nostalgia – from fanboy ‘code monkeys’ who deify the internet with a capital ‘I’ to t-shirts emblazoned with the Ur-meme: ‘All your base are belong to us’ – reigns supreme. He doesn’t neglect the more unsavoury aspects of the times – for example, the emergence of greedy ‘scavengers’ hell-bent on picking over the skeletons of perished start-ups – but he doesn’t exactly condemn them either, a move which graciously spares readers the tedious didacticism so prevalent in American private eye fiction. Says one character caught looting the office of a recently defunct website: ‘“You ever see that movie Zorba the Greek (1964)? the minute this old lady dies, the villagers all go rushing in to grab her stuff? Well, this here’s Zorba the Geek.”’
The Telegraph bills Bleeding Edge as ‘Pynchon’s Twin Towers novel’, but this seems like an oversimplification; the novel is no more about 9/11 than it is about the history of the Silicon Alley community circa 2001. That is to say that the terrorist attack, while undoubtedly momentous, is not the nucleus of the plot but one of many electrons that helps charge it.
The 9/11 attacks, which occur midway through the novel, act chiefly as a springboard for exploring characters’ pre-existing suspicions, an invitation for further cries of apprehension from an already apprehensive crowd (as opposed to a jarring disruption of otherwise happy lives). In fact, one of the sole concessions to the American psyche at large – rather than that of the cliquish community the novel concerns itself with – is a quick, nonetheless loaded, nod to the assumed infallibility of the World Trade Center: ’”Seems kind of flimsy up here,”’ says Maxine’s son while visiting his father’s high-rise office in one of the towers, to which he is told, ‘”Nah… built like a battleship.”’ Meanwhile, Islamophobic slurs are thrown around by minor characters long before the fateful day, and the following conjecture speaks volumes to the latent biases already lurking, ready to surface and be cast into the echo chamber: ‘Many of us need the comfort of a simple story line with Islamic villains, and co-enablers like the Newspaper of Record are delighted to help. Poor, poor America, why do these evil foreigners hate us, must be all this freedom of ours, and how twisted is that, to hate freedom?’
The novel draws on tropes from genres as varied as hardboiled detective novels, psychological thrillers, and pulpy comics, resulting in a gleeful pastiche of the crime fiction persuasion. Buoyed by a yuckity yuk, ‘Why I oughta’ tone (epitomised brilliantly by Maxine’s agency’s name, Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em), the text sees wise-cracking fraudsters threatened with ‘shakedowns’, covert meetings arranged in dive bars and greasy spoons and insiders named Reg and Rocky and Vip fretting over wire-tapped phone lines. Characters speak in choppy sentences, chapters end more often than not in a rhetorical question, and the descriptor ‘jive-ass’ is applied liberally. The effect registers more as parody than cliché, not least upon the introduction of the novel’s central antagonist, Gabriel Ice, a wickedly wealthy CEO one childhood tragedy short of a Batman villain. (Megalomaniac tendencies, corrupt associates, gothic mansion? Check, check and check.)
This risible tone paves the way for a handful of shrewd laughs in the form of rhetorical quips (see the punerific strip club, Joie de Beavre) and references to contemporaneous fads that now appear hilariously outdated (eg, the antics of two hair stylists who’ve ‘spotted an opportunity in the Jennifer Aniston wannabe boom’ and a pair of mobsters who routinely quote Austin Powers). The comedy falls short, however, on the ethnic front: gag upon gag exploiting Jewish stereotypes eventually leaves one questioning whether Cornelia, a Waspy acquaintance of Maxine whose gauche enthusiasm for all things kosher sees her kowtow in the face of brisket and gefilte fish, penned some lines here and there. Maxine (who works next door to a dating agency called Yenta Expresso, by the way) neither brags nor complains; she ‘kvells’ or ‘kvetches’ – when she’s not fending off her mother’s attempts to play cupid or countering her father’s theories on what really happened to the Rosenbergs.
Still, there’s plenty to love about the many comic nods to the near future – for example, Maxine’s incredulity at a friend’s suggestion that ‘Someday there’ll be Napster for videos.’ ‘"How could anybody make money doing that?”’ she wonders, unconvinced. Other predictions prove less cheerful, though equally accurate. Says Maxine’s father: ‘"[The Internet sees] everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”’
Contemporary culture plays a complicated role in Bleeding Edge, serving as ironic fodder and highbrow social commentary at once. We’re invited to scoff at Susan Sontag’s hairstyle while simultaneously encouraged to consider her suppositions, asked to dismiss the resident truther's wild speculations on the government's involvement in 9/11 and the future of New York real estate while noting their substance. This hyper-cognizant approach, this demand that readers both abide and reject where necessary in the pursuit of some ironic form of self-awareness, positions Pynchon himself on the bleeding edge, teetering a line between moral nihilism and edification. If indeed ‘the purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way’, his locus is apposite.
So pens American crime writer Donald E. Westlake, whose words comprise the epigraph to Bleeding Edge, the latest installment in Thomas Pynchon’s varied and well-canvassed repertory. Revisiting the Big Apple as a setting for the first time since his 1963 debut, V, Pynchon heeds Westlake’s direction and employs the city as a facilitator of entropy, a purveyor of paranoia that serves to shroud rather than expose the myriad riddles it beholds.
Of course this isn’t any old New York City. Pynchon’s New York doesn’t hark to notions of Ellis Island egalitarianism or immigrants buoyed by the American Dream, nor does it invite friendly imagery of Broadway and yellow taxis and tourists outfitted in ‘I Heart NYC’ t-shirts. This is early 21st-century, pre-9/11 New York, Manhattan to be specific, where capitalism is creed, tech start-ups abound, yuppies have commandeered the majority of the borough’s neighbourhoods and ‘Disneyfied’ landmarks like Times Square suffer a ‘tightening Noose of Horror’ – a proliferation of ‘multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh!’
These stipulations aside, Pynchon doesn’t deny the city its trademark quirks; for all its stratification, his New York still brims with proudly brazen ‘New Yawkers’, loud-mouthed pedestrians who justly consider queue-jumping ‘a felony’ and deride ‘taking much longer than [one] has to’ as ‘a West Coast thing’. This bustling cityscape provides a neat foil to DeepArcher, a central plot feature that takes the form of a cryptic virtual panorama not unlike Second Life (albeit a beta version).
DeepArcher is ‘the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information’; it is boundless where New York is cramped, lawless in a way that its counterpart, with its omnipresent surveillance regimen, has long ceased to be. So integral is the cyberscape to the pervasive themes of paranoia and moral ambiguity that the novel takes its title from DeepArcher’s industrial classification: ‘what’s known as bleeding-edge technology… no proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with’.
The action centres around the investigative exploits of Maxine Tarnow, a Beretta-toting ‘Yupper West Side’ fraud sleuth who’s not above her own set of loose morals (in classic Pynchon fashion, she’s off the books, having had her certification yanked thanks to her ex-husband’s fishy financial dealings). When a tip prompts Maxine to nose around the accounts of hashslingrz, a computer-security firm improbably thriving in the midst of the dotcom crash wreckage, she starts to unlock door after door of encrypted information and soon becomes ensnared in a wild goose chase through the deepest recesses of the web, searching for links between the iniquitous individuals and sneaky transactions she confronts in her travails. As readers of his previous novels will know, Pynchon is partial to outlandish casts, and his latest doesn’t disappoint: among the gaggle of characters that make appearances are a hacker with a foot fetish, a dealer of FDA-denied Soviet-style ice cream, a professional ‘Nose’ fixated on Hitler’s signature cologne and a Jewish grandmother who doubles as a full-time conspiracy theorist.
New York’s gritty Silicon Alley features heavily, and Pynchon offers a glut of technical minutiae that goes a long way in capturing the zeitgeist of the post dotcom bubble tech industry, where online advertising is ‘still in its infancy’, and early 2000s geek nostalgia – from fanboy ‘code monkeys’ who deify the internet with a capital ‘I’ to t-shirts emblazoned with the Ur-meme: ‘All your base are belong to us’ – reigns supreme. He doesn’t neglect the more unsavoury aspects of the times – for example, the emergence of greedy ‘scavengers’ hell-bent on picking over the skeletons of perished start-ups – but he doesn’t exactly condemn them either, a move which graciously spares readers the tedious didacticism so prevalent in American private eye fiction. Says one character caught looting the office of a recently defunct website: ‘“You ever see that movie Zorba the Greek (1964)? the minute this old lady dies, the villagers all go rushing in to grab her stuff? Well, this here’s Zorba the Geek.”’
The Telegraph bills Bleeding Edge as ‘Pynchon’s Twin Towers novel’, but this seems like an oversimplification; the novel is no more about 9/11 than it is about the history of the Silicon Alley community circa 2001. That is to say that the terrorist attack, while undoubtedly momentous, is not the nucleus of the plot but one of many electrons that helps charge it.
The 9/11 attacks, which occur midway through the novel, act chiefly as a springboard for exploring characters’ pre-existing suspicions, an invitation for further cries of apprehension from an already apprehensive crowd (as opposed to a jarring disruption of otherwise happy lives). In fact, one of the sole concessions to the American psyche at large – rather than that of the cliquish community the novel concerns itself with – is a quick, nonetheless loaded, nod to the assumed infallibility of the World Trade Center: ’”Seems kind of flimsy up here,”’ says Maxine’s son while visiting his father’s high-rise office in one of the towers, to which he is told, ‘”Nah… built like a battleship.”’ Meanwhile, Islamophobic slurs are thrown around by minor characters long before the fateful day, and the following conjecture speaks volumes to the latent biases already lurking, ready to surface and be cast into the echo chamber: ‘Many of us need the comfort of a simple story line with Islamic villains, and co-enablers like the Newspaper of Record are delighted to help. Poor, poor America, why do these evil foreigners hate us, must be all this freedom of ours, and how twisted is that, to hate freedom?’
The novel draws on tropes from genres as varied as hardboiled detective novels, psychological thrillers, and pulpy comics, resulting in a gleeful pastiche of the crime fiction persuasion. Buoyed by a yuckity yuk, ‘Why I oughta’ tone (epitomised brilliantly by Maxine’s agency’s name, Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em), the text sees wise-cracking fraudsters threatened with ‘shakedowns’, covert meetings arranged in dive bars and greasy spoons and insiders named Reg and Rocky and Vip fretting over wire-tapped phone lines. Characters speak in choppy sentences, chapters end more often than not in a rhetorical question, and the descriptor ‘jive-ass’ is applied liberally. The effect registers more as parody than cliché, not least upon the introduction of the novel’s central antagonist, Gabriel Ice, a wickedly wealthy CEO one childhood tragedy short of a Batman villain. (Megalomaniac tendencies, corrupt associates, gothic mansion? Check, check and check.)
This risible tone paves the way for a handful of shrewd laughs in the form of rhetorical quips (see the punerific strip club, Joie de Beavre) and references to contemporaneous fads that now appear hilariously outdated (eg, the antics of two hair stylists who’ve ‘spotted an opportunity in the Jennifer Aniston wannabe boom’ and a pair of mobsters who routinely quote Austin Powers). The comedy falls short, however, on the ethnic front: gag upon gag exploiting Jewish stereotypes eventually leaves one questioning whether Cornelia, a Waspy acquaintance of Maxine whose gauche enthusiasm for all things kosher sees her kowtow in the face of brisket and gefilte fish, penned some lines here and there. Maxine (who works next door to a dating agency called Yenta Expresso, by the way) neither brags nor complains; she ‘kvells’ or ‘kvetches’ – when she’s not fending off her mother’s attempts to play cupid or countering her father’s theories on what really happened to the Rosenbergs.
Still, there’s plenty to love about the many comic nods to the near future – for example, Maxine’s incredulity at a friend’s suggestion that ‘Someday there’ll be Napster for videos.’ ‘"How could anybody make money doing that?”’ she wonders, unconvinced. Other predictions prove less cheerful, though equally accurate. Says Maxine’s father: ‘"[The Internet sees] everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”’
Contemporary culture plays a complicated role in Bleeding Edge, serving as ironic fodder and highbrow social commentary at once. We’re invited to scoff at Susan Sontag’s hairstyle while simultaneously encouraged to consider her suppositions, asked to dismiss the resident truther's wild speculations on the government's involvement in 9/11 and the future of New York real estate while noting their substance. This hyper-cognizant approach, this demand that readers both abide and reject where necessary in the pursuit of some ironic form of self-awareness, positions Pynchon himself on the bleeding edge, teetering a line between moral nihilism and edification. If indeed ‘the purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way’, his locus is apposite.