Bleeding Edge Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge

    • 3.5 • 131 Ratings
    • $13.99
    • $13.99

Publisher Description

The Washington Post



“Brilliantly written… a joy to read… Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.” (Michael Dirda)




It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her licence got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mum - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighbourhood - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler's aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channelling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2013
September 17
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
496
Pages
PUBLISHER
Penguin Publishing Group
SELLER
PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.
SIZE
1.6
MB

Customer Reviews

lionessarielle ,

Okay read

This novel was definitely a pleasure to read if only for the brain stimulation Pynchon's writing style provides. The story itself was disappointing, I got to the end and thought "that's it?" Wouldn't give this novel an enthusiastic recommendation, but I think it's worth the read.

_m ,

Another brilliant Pynchon novel

Wow.
Wow wow wow.
I lived through the late nineties Silicon Alley phenomenon when it felt like it was falling apart (my first company changed from a Systems to a Solutions to a Razorfish in the span of a year), and Pynchon did an excellent job of capturing it. The book was people with the usual Pynchon-esque conspiracies, bagfuls of characters, genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, and touching come downs, as well.
I actually enjoyed Pynchon's take on 11 September, as well as the craziness of some of those Silicon Alley days, but it's just how Pynchon writes so effortlessly, I love lines like:
"Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought."
"If you were doing something in secret and didn't want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?"
Some of the lines are cheesy, like "Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll," but even in those you get the sense of a man completely happy in what he's doing, which is writing a breathtaking novel which speeds along through the Upper West Side and a changing New York City.
At any rate, I loved this book, laughed out loud a lot while I was reading it, and enjoyed Mr. Pynchon's take on early 2000s New York City.

Lymond ,

Funny, rich, complex

Look, Pynchon doesn’t write page-turners: he writes brain-turners. His tales are labyrinthine and seldom tie up loose ends—which is ironic given how full of paranoid connections and conspiracies they are. His prose is layered, complex, nuanced, and often very funny. You can’t skim his books; you have to read them slowly and carefully. So: they’re not for everyone.

I am giving this one five stars because I completely enjoyed reading it.

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