05-06-25 - bleeding edge:

i completed reading Pynchon's 2013 novel yesterday morning. the ending was affecting, Maxine watching her kids walk themselves to school. the scene stuck with me as i then walked myself to the office shortly thereafter, thinking about my parents, wishing i was still being looked after in such a way, and about the prospect of being a parent.

lots of interesting, brainy takes have emerged in response to Bleeding Edge - e.g., Chabon's review in NYR - so i'm hesitant to wax too analytical on its mysteries or themes here.

i've read a few Pynchon books in the following order: The Crying of Lot 49 in 2021, V in 2022, Gravity's Rainbow in 2024, Vineland in 2024, and Slow Learner in 2024. i suspect my break from reading him in 2023 had something to do with me being in school and working several jobs concurrently, leaving me little enthusiasm for non-school- or -work-related thinking.

last year, my Pynchon interest was reignited in response to the rumors surrounding PTA's upcoming film, now confirmed to be a pseudo-adaptation of Vineland with a different title, One Battle After Another. this interest was bolstered further by the more recent news that Pynchon will be releasing a novel, Shadow Ticket this October. also, i've been doing some tech reading lately, so choosing Pynchon's internet novel as my next was an easy choice.

while BE can get fuzzy in its treatment of technical ideas, its actual literary stuff is great. i agree with others that there's something different about this book compared to Pynchon's earlier work, that it's a bit more regularly sentimental in a satisfying, not exclusively silly way. the stakes of the novel feel more personal, Maxine's investigation of hashlingerz having less to do with trying to prevent an impending calamity than with worrying over whether her family will withstand its aftermath.

thinking about the end of GR, the bomb falling on a movie theater, it's the culmination of historical machinations that Pynchon has outlined always - flows of money and power in the hands of few over time, careening towards cataclysm. with BE we see more of the same:

They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes-family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore . . . the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some suprise package, by those who've kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready (339).

but we also get hints of another type of impending outcome, a more quotidian yet perhaps equally weighty one:

Maxine begins to prowl the apartment. The boys stacked in bunk beds, the door left a little open, she likes to think for her, knowing that someday their doors will be shut and she'll have to knock (417).

The boys have been waiting for her, and of course that's when she flashes back to not so long ago down in DeepArcher, down in their virtual hometown of Zigotisopolis, both of them standing just like this, folded in just this precarious light, ready to step out into their peacable city, still safe from the spiders and bots that one day too soon will be coming for it, to claim-jump it in the name of the indexed world (476).

caught in the flows of money/time/etc, a mother puzzles over whether her sons will leave their door open as they grow older. beyond this, more gravely, she wonders how they will bear the future's unknowns. the capital H history of Pynchon's novels takes on a maternal slant in BE.

certain aspects of BE chip away at the rosy take i'm offering here - e.g., the seemingly racist characterization of Daytona Lorrain, the stripper and foot fetish Eric Outfield scenes, the gross Nicholas Windust sexual encounter. these aspects of the book are not novel by Pynchon standards recalling how GR didn't win the Pulitzer per its respective obscenities, but they keep me from viewing BE as fundamentally upbeat or optimistic.

i'm curious how the novel will be received down the road, if it'll be held in the same regard as Lot 49 or GR. at this point, over a decade after BE's initial release, the internet has only become more ubiquitous, metastasizing as a hotbed for evils both private and public. given that this trend shows no signs of letting up, maybe BE will stand the test of time. for the present, though, it just makes me want to give my mom a phone call to say 'hello' and 'thank you.'