Let it bleed: Thoughts on Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge”

 

Gravity’s Rainbow bent my brain. I was in Buffalo, living in a dilapidated third-floor walkup with a roommate, a few sticks of discarded furniture and a sizable number of cockroaches. The apartment had once been spacious and gracious, with bow windows overlooking a tidy Italian neighborhood. But now it was long since worn and whittled down, its fireplace sealed off, its original floor plan hidden by a drop ceiling so flimsy that merely shutting a door made its panels flop in their frames.

I was jobless, just out of college, where I’d been keen for Kurt Vonnegut, as many of us were back then (though I’d been an even bigger fan of folk singer Richard Fariña’s only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, which I carried around with me until the little paperback frayed and fragmented). That’s why I wound up with two brand-new hardcovers of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions from different donors for my birthday.

I took one back to the bookstore, hoping to get cash for it, but was told I could only exchange it for other books. My eye fell on Gravity’s Rainbow, fresh out in softcover. I was just 21 and knew very little, but I understood GR was important, a literary event. I also happened to know one of the few personal details anyone knew about Thomas Pynchon, which was that at some point he’d hung out with Richard Fariña.

I hefted the book and looked at the back, which bore the words A screaming comes across the sky. Even after selecting it along with The Food Stamp Gourmet (a hippie cookbook I continued consulting even after my circumstances improved), I still had exchange value coming, so I threw in Pynchon’s first novel, V.

After getting the disappointing Breakfast of Champions out of the way, I turned to V.; I’d already read a chapter of it, “In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job,” in an anthology. Quickly I comprehended what had inspired Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, its caustic tone and18th-century-style chapter headings.

But Fariña’s book was Dr. Seuss compared to V. The novel was entertaining, but also frustrating. I kept expecting its labyrinthine plot to resolve itself, yet it never did. Puzzled but intrigued, I moved on to GR. And fell into a vortex.

Ostensibly the novel was set in Europe at the end of World War II, but it seemed more like an intricate hallucination about the war. I roamed the stateless territory of the Zone, a medley of mad songs buzzing in my head. I glutted myself on nauseating jelly-filled candies and bananas prepared a thousand different ways. Deep inside a toilet in the Roseland Ballroom I discovered a vast underground world. I parsed extravagant interpretations of the phrase “You never did the Kenosha Kid” and met a sentient lightbulb named Byron.

In a word, I became immersed. With no bosses or parents or teachers to distract me, I’d carry the book to a little park nearby and sit under a tree, underlining passages and scribbling in the margins as I struggled to grasp elements of chemistry, history, psychology, ballistics and a dozen other disciplines key to the story. Literally as well as literarily, the book was rocket science.

As I tried to wrap my head around it all, I surrendered to Pynchon’s intricate thought process. Of course, anyone who reads a novel enters its writer’s mental landscape, assimilates at least some of his or her assumptions and judgments and worldview; otherwise they’d simply close the book. But with his Byzantine imagination and polymathic erudition, Pynchon demands more commitment than most.

Yet while he may be the most important American novelist of our time, Pynchon is still in the business of selling books (tellingly, in June 2012 he finally consented to the release of all his works in e-book format). Like any contemporary author, he faces the paradox of crafting literature in a post-literate age, of writing long-form narrative when the very names of many media — Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram — denote how minuscule our attention spans have become.

How does a writer stay relevant in the age of the Internet? One strategy: Write about the Internet.

So with Bleeding Edge Pynchon turns away from the historical (albeit highly imagined) settings of GR, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day and toward the recent past: He sets the novel in 2000-01 New York City. (This is symmetrical with V., much of which is also set in New York, in the 1950s, only a few years before the book was published in 1963.)

Yet despite its modern-day setting, Bleeding Edge is structured like a 1930s detective novel by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler (Pynchon’s 2009 Inherent Vice is also a detective story; aficionados know it shares its fictional universe with Bleeding Edge, evinced in the latter when a character sings the imaginary oldie “Soul Gidget,” described in Vice as “one of the few known attempts at black surf music”). Like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, fraud examiner Maxine Tarnow begins an investigation and soon finds that every door she enters, each shady character she meets, tangles her deeper in a web (or Web) of conspiracy. At its nexus is a ruthless Silicon Alley entrepreneur named Gabriel Ice.

Two motifs overarch Pynchon’s oeuvre: entropy and paranoia. In Bleeding Edge the former manifests in the deflation of the late ’90s tech bubble, epitomized in a fin de siecle dot-com revel that evokes some of the most eloquent writing in the book and harks back to the early Pynchon story “Entropy,” set around a lease-breaking party.

The paranoia motif coalesces, with unsettling plausibility, around the attacks of Sept. 11. To a reader like me who was in New York City that ghastly morning, 9/11 is like a doomsday clock whose ticking grows louder in proportion to the depths of intrigue down which Maxine spirals.

Even so, Bleeding Edge is very funny. Like Nick Charles in Hammett’s The Thin Man, who has a high-society wife but consorts with grifters and gunsels, Maxine straddles two worlds: she is a more or less respectable Manhattan mom, but also a MILF who carries a gun in her purse as she roams a demimonde teeming with digital-age Damon Runyon characters. She has lost her license but finds, like Hammett’s Sam Spade, that being a bit disreputable may be good for business. Her voice blends Borscht Belt one-liners with witty wordplay.

Plucky Maxine may be Pynchon’s most likable protagonist ever, but she’s as shallow as her creator’s allusions are deep, and many members of the novel’s typically profuse supporting cast are so insubstantial that the main thing that distinguishes them are their whimsical names (Felix Boïngueaux, Conkling Speedwell, Carmine Nozzoli, Chazz Larday, to cite just a few). Pynchon is not immune to sentiment; he has compassion for his characters, but he engages with them from the remote distance of the inveterate satirist.

And Bleeding Edge is filled with satirical conceits that are quintessentially Pynchonian. There’s the American Borderline Personality Association, whose members dance to Madonna’s “Borderline” as they cruise to destinations like the Mason-Dixon Line; a “private nose” who uses his super sense of smell in forensic investigations, and a Queens strip club called Joie de Beavre, whose manager is named Stu Gotz.

But fanciful (and often downright silly) though it is, Bleeding Edge is dense with details about its real-world time and place: turn-of-the-millennium music, movies, TV shows, videogames, fads, fashions, furniture and more, much more. The book is meticulously — in fact, obsessively — researched. Scrawled notes about everything from Mayan mythology to the CIA’s Montauk Project litter the margins of my copy, making them as messy as the ones in that paperback of Gravity’s Rainbow that fell into my hands long ago.

More than Vineland or Against the Day, Bleeding Edge reintroduced me to the Thomas Pynchon who bent my brain with GR; like an addict returning to his drug of choice after years of abstinence, I could feel long-dark neural passageways flaring back to sudden life. But unlike GR, Bleeding Edge isn’t about events that took place before I was born; it’s Pynchon’s take on times I’ve lived through myself.

I witnessed some of the genesis of the commercial Internet, first at the failed online service Prodigy before the Web was even woven, and later at several early websites. In the days during which Bleeding Edge takes place, I was on the fringes of Silicon Alley and the tech bubble, covering them in a trade publication I edited. I partied with engineers and overnight zillionaires; I interviewed for a job with a magazine swollen with dot-com ads, now long gone. On 9/11 I was still at my trade magazine in the Chelsea district, not far north of what became known as Ground Zero.

In the days of irrational exuberance before the millennium ended and the Towers came down, I still harbored some ideals about the Internet; I fancied it a force for democracy, a powerful tool that would put secrets once accessible only to initiates at the fingertips of the common man. But now that it has been my daily workplace for some years, it seems to me that it has empowered people chiefly in the sense that corporations are people, and that most of what it has put at people’s fingertips is a limitless repository of tripe and hype.

Pynchon’s view of the Internet is even longer and more jaundiced than mine; the pattern he perceives arcs like a rainbow all the way back to the era in which most of his first novel is set: the 1950s. It seems appropriate that Maxine’s creator chooses the character of her father, Ernie, an Upper West Side leftie, to deliver judgment:

“You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios,” Ernie lectures Maxine. “…Your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

Smart though it is, some have referred to Bleeding Edge as “Pynchon Lite” (The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani coined the term in her review of Inherent Vice) compared to the epic length and Gordian complexity of Gravity’s Rainbow. I think it’s the work of a great novelist who makes no apology for the intellectual rigor of his work, but also sees no disgrace in doing a novelist’s job: to share his view of the world with the world, as much of it as he can possibly reach. He’s not ashamed to entertain.

A friend recently pointed out that in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, it strains credulity that a prospective Congressional candidate would not realize very quickly that the woman he is dating is not what she pretends to be. That Allen, now 78, found it necessary to contrive a chance street encounter to advance that plot point may betray his unfamiliarity with such newfangled advances as search engines and social networks.

Pynchon is only a year and a half younger than Allen, but as its title implies, Bleeding Edge shows him fully conversant with current culture, technology and events. Whether that fluency is organic or attained via research matters little; what matters is that his observation is as sharp and relevant as ever.

But age may have annealed Pynchon’s blazing talent with a touch of humility, made him willing to meet readers halfway (or at least a quarter or fifth of the way). If it has, I think we are better off for it.