The Great Flattening Mitchum Huehls (bio) Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge. New York: Penguin, 2013. 477 pp. $28.95. Thomas Pynchon is seventy-six years old, and he knows more about Jamiroquai than you do. He also knows more about Japanese Manga, early Web-programming languages, Russian hip-hop, the Knicks, the Washington, D.C., punk scene, the best places to eat in Iowa, 1980s arcade games, the history of early tech start-ups, the Mossad, and Manhattan real estate. It’s Thomas Pynchon’s world; we just live in it. Spanning most of 2001, Bleeding Edge also reserves cameo roles for Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Beanie Babies, Ally McBeal, Zima, Leonardo DiCaprio, Friends, Furbies, Brad Pitt, and Nelly. Also, September 11. It’s weird, even jarring, to read Pynchon writing about these things. Not because his references point to so much mass-market schlock—Pynchon has always been at home in the philistine low-brow; it’s how his novels attach themselves to the world—but because those references are so aggressively contemporary. As a former student of mine put it in an e-mail: “I feel like Pynchon is writing about my life. It’s like, ‘hello childhood.’” Indeed, I’ve also shopped at Zabar’s, partied like it’s 1999, and noted that Kum & Go is a hilarious name. Wasted hours of your life playing Tetris? Remember when 56K was an awesomely fast download speed? Ever live on a street in New York City where Law & Order shot some scenes? Check. Check. Check. The early [End Page 861] days of the Internet, the ballooning and popping of the tech bubble, Y2K, 9–11—remember that decade? I do, and if you’re old enough to want to read Bleeding Edge, odds are that you do, too. The insistent contemporaneity of Bleeding Edge doesn’t stop in 2001. Instead, ramifying beyond the September 11 attacks, Pynchon’s vision expands forward over the ensuing decade until it reaches our immediate present. Here, for example, in one character’s take on the Internet, the novel anticipates not just recent revelations about NSA surveillance but also Samsung’s new smartwatch: Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. (420)1 In the Pynchonian long view, the most advanced technologies of our digital age are just teasing out the comic-strip dreams of the cold war imaginary. It would be easy to give Bleeding Edge short shrift precisely because of its contemporaneity. Its aggressive attachment to the present could backfire, leaving the novel to languish in irrelevance, just another bleeding-edge technology: “no proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with” (78). Of course, Pynchon’s early adopters—those of us who preordered the book from Amazon in mid summer—will probably feel charmed by and comfortable with Pynchon’s foray into the now, but the immediacy of Bleeding Edge’s certainly risks alienating those who pin Pynchon’s “serious author” status to his proven investment in the expansive historical novel. After all, what good are literary representations of events still unfolding in real time? How can a novel cope with the amped-up creative destruction of twenty-first-century technologies, [End Page 862] always threatening to make the present obsolete? Has Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel given way to a merely Wikipedic one?2 I don’t think so, and unless one belongs to that subclass of Pynchonistas who reflexively value the vast and voluminous, who react with Slothropian ardor to confounding arcana, I’m not sure it really matters. There are other, better reasons to read Pynchon’s novels—the connective vision, the hilarity, the tenderness, the prose style, the names—and Bleeding Edge delivers on every front. It’s even replete with the kind of abstract interpretive matrices and geometric scaffoldings (the Wittgensteinian radio frequencies of V., the...
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Jun 23, 2016
Adil Yousif + 2
Open Access
