Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

Hardcover, 477 pages

English language

Published Nov. 7, 2013 by Penguin Press.

ISBN:: 9781594204234
OCLC Number:: 837179750

(8 reviews)

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com 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.

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

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 license 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 mom—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 neighborhood—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 DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling 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?

7 editions

Sharyl reviewed Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Review of 'Bleeding Edge' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

bleed·ing edge

noun: bleeding edge; plural noun: bleeding edges

-- the very forefront of technological development.

Before reading this novel, I did not know the meaning of this term, so here it is.

And also, I am still surprised that I've picked up another Thomas Pynchon book...Unfortunately, I started with The Crying of Lot 49, which was a complete mystery to me, though I did laugh out loud at that strip poker scene. Pynchon always makes me laugh at unexpected times.

This time, we (the readers) follow Maxine Tarnow/Loeffler, a fraud examiner, as she looks into the nefarious goings on at a computer security firm called hashslingz, run by a badass named Gabriel Ice.

The colorful characters, clever and funny dialogue, and social commentary make these 400+ pages sparkle. When it comes to the plot, there are many issues that are not resolved. These fascinating scenarios are vehicles that Pynchon …

GG reviewed Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Review of 'Bleeding Edge' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

I might have thought this was clever back when I was a freshman in undergrad, but at present I am so annoyed with it that I can't even ennumerate the ways in which it is disappointing, irritating, and pointless. Just don't read it.