![]() ![]() This comes complete with the necessary attitude adjustment in the form of Maxine Tarnow - a decertified Fraud Examiner, with two boys, an ex-husband still somewhat around, a surfer/Buddhist therapist, competitive best friend, and increasingly bizarre clientele. Hippie-ish West Coast lifestyle is contrasted throughout with the hustle and grit of New York City: keeping with a private investigator protagonist à la Doc Sportello of his last novel, Inherent Vice, and the beloved questing female lead perhaps best exemplified by Oedipa Maas of The Crying Of Lot 49, Bleeding Edge rolls these characters into one and transports them from their native 60s California to the Big Apple forty years later. And how cool is it that a 76-year-old man is writing about Bad Brains and the Jay-Z/Nas feud, as well as myriad other pop and fringe cultural reference points? And, perhaps, with seven other works to compare it to now, we can begin to see more clearly the similarities within Pynchon’s vast universe: each book a seemingly complete encyclopaedia of everything, and yet there he goes again with a whole new shebang of the celebrated, obscure, technical, and the throwaway. ![]() Though one hopes, at this rate, that we’re blessed with at least one more grand final statement, this newest offering being the third Pynchon novel in seven years - as opposed to the four novels and one novella in the preceding forty-three. It’s hard to imagine anything surpassing 2006’s 1220-pages-at-last-edition Against The Day for that. (I know a girl who won’t speak to anyone for three months after they’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, because, let’s face it, that’s really all you want to talk about after you’ve finished (and are probably reading again to figure out what the hell was going on.)īleeding Edge isn’t the big, sprawling "final novel" people might still be expecting. That’s not to say they’re without headaches from the intricacies of plot, shoulder aches from lugging around the heavy tomes, and calendar dates gone missing from being so absorbed. Fifty years of dense, exhilaratingly prose, extended moments of euphoria and revulsion, new fields and curiosities aplenty to explore whilst marvelling at Pynchon’s seemingly infinite knowledge - and of course boggle at the genius presenting it all to us in works of literature that number amongst the most beautiful ever written. The release of Bleeding Edge marks fifty years of Thomas Pynchon novels five decades since V appeared in 1963. ![]()
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