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.'”