Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon: To the World Wide Web...and Beyond!

My head hurts, and I'm tired. It's like I'm hungover. Pynchon-blitzed, as it were. Here's a thing I don't recommend: Reading 150 pages of Pynchon in one day. That's what I did yesterday, and I had the absolute strangest dreams last night, and as I write this the morning after finishing Thomas Pynchon's 2013 novel, Bleeding Edge, I'm not sure if I'm awake or still dreaming. 

Pynchon is a madman. A comic genius. A brilliant writer. Maybe a kook? (Did you ever hear the conspiracy theory that the notoriously elusive Pynchon is actually the Unabomber?)

Look, when you pick up a Pynchon novel, you have to expect to be by turns amazed, frustrated, immensely entertained, bored, confused, tickled, and awed. Thankfully, most of these are the reasons why I read, and that's why I picked up this book. 

Why now? Because Pynchon is publishing a new novel (and almost certainly his last) this fall titled Shadow Ticket, and I wanted to remind myself what he's like (and also maybe I'm just a little bit of a reading masochist). This is my third time reading Pynchon. I still have Gravity's Rainbow PTSD, but I absolutely loved Inherent Vice.

Bleeding Edge is definitely more Inherent Vice than Gravity's Rainbow. It's a zany caper about New York City in 2001, before during and after the tech boom and bust in Silicon Alley, and before, during, and after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Pynchon seems to think these two are connected, though not in a conspiracy theory way, more in a thematic way -- that they both were the end of an age of innocence and excess (innocently excessive? excessively innocent?), and that they both resulted in fundamental changes to this American life. 

The story is actually about Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator, who is tipped off to some shady dealings by a start-up called hashslingrz and its tech bro CEO Gabriel Ice. Then a guy who was skimming money from hashslingrz's skimmed money winds up dead, and Maxine now has not just a fraud investigation but a murder mystery on her hands. Then Maxine gets a mysterious video of some guys on the roof of a NYC building practicing with a Stinger missile launcher. Then 9/11 happens. How the hell are all these things connected?

Or maybe they're not. Maybe everything is totally random. Who knows? At least there's some good Pynchon Puns.

Lemme give you an example. Maxine's son Ziggy is watching a movie when she comes back to the apartment one evening. It's the (fictional) 1990 film Scooby Goes Latin!, in which the Scooby-Doo gang travels to Columbia to bust a dirty DEA agent mixed up in a drug cartel. "And I would've got away with it, too," he complains, "if it hadn't been for these Medellin kids." God dammit, that's funny. 

Is the madcap plot and these puns and clever-alities (a Pynchon-esque non-word?) enough to keep you turning pages? Just barely, I think. Yes, I'm glad I read this but knowing what I know now having finished it, I'm not sure I'd read it again. This book is like tasting a whiskey you're not sure you like, but keep drinking anyway.