Another Great Thomas Pynchon Novel
Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, the warmly human Bleeding Edge, is among his best works. While nothing could compare with Gravity's Rainbow, (indeed, few books written in the last 50 years should be mentioned in the same sentence), Bleeding Edge is as good as V. and Mason & Dixon.
Pynchon deeply cares about how the world works, and what is happening politically, socially, and economically. Pynchon is among our best novelists operating at this high level. He shows the corporate forces that dictate too much of our lives, and the technology that takes us too often away from the people in our lives. Pynchon's protagonists try to find alternative ways of evading those forces.
His main subjects in Bleeding Edge are how 9/11 and the Internet have affected our culture. As a writer who in other books has suggested conspiracies of powerful forces exerting control, Pynchon articulates (using 'as if' and equivocation) but then dismisses many conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. He's after less fanciful and more insidious game here: the way that government figures allied with military/security commercial forces used the 9/11 atrocity to impose a manichean narrative of fear and permanent warfare on the American psyche.
A false grand narrative, and as U-2 says, "We're stealing it back." Don DeLillo recommended that writers create a counter-narrative; Pynchon creates that counter-narrative for post-9/11 life. That includes remembering all the Reagan/Bush imperial predation that the official post-9/11 narrative buried. He doesn't blithely dismiss fear, (our heroine Maxine gets into dangerous situations on a couple of occasions and realizes it), but he wants our fears focused on matters within our control. Who would have expected that parenting would be such an important issue in a Pynchon novel? Or that he would give us such an emotionally satisfying ending?
Pynchon has always favored characters attracted to the frontier, people who want to live apart from the controls imposed by the megalithic forces of commerce or government. The outlaws, the renegades, the adventurers, the pilgrims, the folks on the fringe. His latest frontier is the Deep Web, away from the bots and spiders and all the forces that want to suburbanize it and make it safe, respectable and commercial. Nothing will stay frontier for long, as those forces will always move toward the frontier to monetize it. But his characters can still move a bit further out to escape the forces that would addict us to brands, hip tech toys, porn, and mindless videos. Deep Archer, the novel's virtual sanctuary to escape to from the developed world, may have been compromised, but there will always be people like Eric Outfield who create wondrous new spaces and who occasionally strike blows against the developers.
One of Pynchon's strengths as a writer is how he shows the world to us. He often uses the structure of a detective story, with a protagonist acting like a detective (in the case of Inherent Vice, an actual detective), trying to figure out a complicated situation. Some critics pan his plots as confusing, shaggy-dog stories. While the plots can certainly be confusing on first read, it's because Pynchon puts the reader in the place of the protagonist trying to figure out what's going on. We feel the experience of Maxine as she tries to unravel what is happening around the sinister dot.com hashslingerz. Yes, we have to work a bit to figure it out, and there are false leads and false grand narratives, but there is coherence in Pynchon's vision that makes the effort worthwhile. He throws in unrealistic elements like time travel and a porous border between life and death, but I read these as metaphoric.
One reason his novels can seem confusing is because he sometimes uses ellipses, and does not waste words moving characters around. Two characters can be talking, a third is mentioned, and in the next line, one of the first two characters is following up with the third in a separate scene, with no transition. This style is wonderfully efficient and facilitates the inclusion of lots of plot. No one can complain that not enough happens in a Pynchon novel.
But he also shows us Maxine as she travels through a vivid N.Y.C. Pynchon gives us beautiful descriptions of the city he sees and loves, a real world not wholly corrupted by crass development, though some of it may be gone forever (as is rued by those of us who loved Ames Billiards). His descriptive prose is as good as anyone's writing today, and has been for the last fifty years.
February, 2014
Pynchon deeply cares about how the world works, and what is happening politically, socially, and economically. Pynchon is among our best novelists operating at this high level. He shows the corporate forces that dictate too much of our lives, and the technology that takes us too often away from the people in our lives. Pynchon's protagonists try to find alternative ways of evading those forces.
His main subjects in Bleeding Edge are how 9/11 and the Internet have affected our culture. As a writer who in other books has suggested conspiracies of powerful forces exerting control, Pynchon articulates (using 'as if' and equivocation) but then dismisses many conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. He's after less fanciful and more insidious game here: the way that government figures allied with military/security commercial forces used the 9/11 atrocity to impose a manichean narrative of fear and permanent warfare on the American psyche.
A false grand narrative, and as U-2 says, "We're stealing it back." Don DeLillo recommended that writers create a counter-narrative; Pynchon creates that counter-narrative for post-9/11 life. That includes remembering all the Reagan/Bush imperial predation that the official post-9/11 narrative buried. He doesn't blithely dismiss fear, (our heroine Maxine gets into dangerous situations on a couple of occasions and realizes it), but he wants our fears focused on matters within our control. Who would have expected that parenting would be such an important issue in a Pynchon novel? Or that he would give us such an emotionally satisfying ending?
Pynchon has always favored characters attracted to the frontier, people who want to live apart from the controls imposed by the megalithic forces of commerce or government. The outlaws, the renegades, the adventurers, the pilgrims, the folks on the fringe. His latest frontier is the Deep Web, away from the bots and spiders and all the forces that want to suburbanize it and make it safe, respectable and commercial. Nothing will stay frontier for long, as those forces will always move toward the frontier to monetize it. But his characters can still move a bit further out to escape the forces that would addict us to brands, hip tech toys, porn, and mindless videos. Deep Archer, the novel's virtual sanctuary to escape to from the developed world, may have been compromised, but there will always be people like Eric Outfield who create wondrous new spaces and who occasionally strike blows against the developers.
One of Pynchon's strengths as a writer is how he shows the world to us. He often uses the structure of a detective story, with a protagonist acting like a detective (in the case of Inherent Vice, an actual detective), trying to figure out a complicated situation. Some critics pan his plots as confusing, shaggy-dog stories. While the plots can certainly be confusing on first read, it's because Pynchon puts the reader in the place of the protagonist trying to figure out what's going on. We feel the experience of Maxine as she tries to unravel what is happening around the sinister dot.com hashslingerz. Yes, we have to work a bit to figure it out, and there are false leads and false grand narratives, but there is coherence in Pynchon's vision that makes the effort worthwhile. He throws in unrealistic elements like time travel and a porous border between life and death, but I read these as metaphoric.
One reason his novels can seem confusing is because he sometimes uses ellipses, and does not waste words moving characters around. Two characters can be talking, a third is mentioned, and in the next line, one of the first two characters is following up with the third in a separate scene, with no transition. This style is wonderfully efficient and facilitates the inclusion of lots of plot. No one can complain that not enough happens in a Pynchon novel.
But he also shows us Maxine as she travels through a vivid N.Y.C. Pynchon gives us beautiful descriptions of the city he sees and loves, a real world not wholly corrupted by crass development, though some of it may be gone forever (as is rued by those of us who loved Ames Billiards). His descriptive prose is as good as anyone's writing today, and has been for the last fifty years.
February, 2014
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