Hello, Carl?

I'm with you in Rockland.

Why? Why Not?

For the night is young and full of terrors.

"Pynchon Grew Up"

         My buddy, whom I shall call Suwanee (not his real nickname), defends Pynchon this way:

         "My sense of Bleeding Edge was that, after decades of hiding out, sleeping on friends' couches, staying stoned and watching tv and reading pulp novels, Pynchon grew up, got married, and had kids and settled down. He still has the vivid writing style, madcap humor, and post modernist multiple perspectives.  His characters still seem to feel like they are part of some huge thing they don’t understand at all, and they see connections and weird explanations that never really amount to much, but in this book, Maxine has a real life to go back to. Benny Profane didn’t."

          In other words, Suwanee believes that Pynchon is still alive and wrote the book. The "got married" is the real problematic part, but I'll save that for another post.

 

  

Weirdly Sophomoric

        The avatars (?!) at tabloidofthedamned.com don't like it, of course, but after reading Bleeding Edge, I found the NY Times review by Michiko Kakutani to be spot-on: “... a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details. 

          ".... All the author’s familiar trademarks are here: a multitudinous cast with ditsy, Dickensian names; shaggy-dog plotlines sprouting everywhere, like kudzu; large heapings of coincidence.... And yet, for a novel concerned with Sept. 11, Bleeding Edge is weirdly Pynchon Lite.... 

            "The novel’s default mode is weirdly sophomoric in tone, much like its recently released trailer, which features a young man wearing novelty sunglasses and a T-shirt that reads, 'Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon,' wandering around Zabar’s on the Upper West Side and buying smoked salmon, which he later drapes over his face as a 'natural exfoliant.' 

              With the exception of the wonderful title characters in Mason & Dixon, who emerged as deeply felt, genuine human beings, Mr. Pynchon’s people have always verged on the cartoonish, but those in Bleeding Edge are especially poor specimens, neither resonant nor satiric in any memorable way. Other details in this novel also ring false or feel unworthy of a writer with as prodigal an imagination as Mr. Pynchon’s. It’s absurd that Maxine — who is more convincing as a nice Upper West Side mom with two young sons than she is as a Beretta-packing investigator — would have sex with a scummy suspect, who’s 'a torturer, a murderer many times over.'”

The "Official Trailer"

For those conspiracy theorists who believe others wrote Bleeding Edge and Pynchon is not even alive, a "confirming" proof is the odd video that his publisher put out celebrating the book, in which a young man sporting a T-shirt saying "Hi, I'm Tom Pynchon," talks about being "King of the Yuppie West Side."  Could this be legal evidence that the publisher plans to introduce into court later, if/when the company is sued for allegedly perpetrating a fraud, to claim that the Pynchon authorship was a spoof from the very beginning that no one could take seriously. If you haven't seen the video, you can watch it here.

Soho in the rain

I'd like to meet his tailor.

Such an odd phrase

Consider this: On page 136 of Bleeding Edge, the author(s?) describe a TV character, Hakeem, as a “pro defensive linebacker,” which is a silly phrase since all linebackers are defensive -- an indication that the author(s?) don't know football. That's particularly interesting when he(they?) do such meticulous research into the dot-com era and Russian hip-hop history in the same chapter. So why didn't the commentators at tabloidofthedamned.com catch this error? Could it be that they didn't realize it because they're the ones who committed it?

"20 Years Smoking Pot and Watching TV"

Careful readers know that his career spun downhill after the magnificent Gravity's Rainbow. An insightful writer has commented that, hiding out in California, he “spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV.” His latest effort is almost a cartoon of his previous writing – meticulously describing by brand name the hippest purses, arcane Manhattan locations and details of the web that this 70-something would have struggled mightily to learn in order to stay hip – if by chance he was really doing his own work.

One theory is that during that lapse, others started taking over the writing that appears under his byline – and who's to say no? Since Pynchon never appears in public, he could in fact appear to be living forever.