With the recent passing of Elmore Leonard, it is apt that Pynchon has chosen a quote from Leonard’s contemporary Donald Westlake to serve as the epigraph for what follows in his second straight detective yarn:
New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it.
Pynchon and Leonard are essentially trying to reach two different audiences: for Leonard, his ideal reader might be the thriller-addict who cannot help but leave half his lunchtime sandwich between the pages of the latest adventure so ravenously does he consume Leonard’s clear-running prose.
Pynchon’s writing on the other hand is not susceptible to engorgement: what is required is an attention to subtle shifts in register, an eye out for the fact that Pynchon’s prose will not only suddenly dip into caricature, almost to the point of dressing up the vernacular in clown-paint, but also – and sometimes on the same page – separate out interstitial meanings oftentimes conveyed by way of an ethnic inflection from what is literally being said with an uncanny, almost mathematical, precision.
Bleeding Edge is set in the year 2001, in the aftermath of the dot.com meltdown and opens on a day in the life of decertified fraud inspector Maxine (Maxi) Tarnow. Maxi has recently embarked on an investigation of a company called hashslingerz.com, headed by the charismatic millionaire Gabriel Ice. In the course of her investigation Maxi comes to believe that Ice is behind the recent demise of one Lester Traipse – a Silicon Alley veteran who may have been illicitly siphoning off funds from Ice. Maxi also discovers that Ice is, in turn, fleecing hashslingerz and could potentially be funneling his ill-gotten gains through a series of middlemen to Islamic terrorists.
Running concurrently with her investigation, Maxi has also become involved with a pair of Californian tech transplants (Justin and Lucas) and who introduce her to DeepArcher, a program which provides access to the Deep Web: the greater – hidden – part of the internet which regular search engines and protocols cannot penetrate: a kind of online wild frontier to which no flag or history has yet staked a claim. Contrasting with this virtual zone is what Pynchon calls “meatspace:” New York City moves to front and center, its lived history perhaps never more present than when in danger of ebbing away:
…the old miniature apartment buildings with fancy Anglo names and classical columns flanking their narrow stoops, the arch-shaped window openings and elaborate wrought-iron fire escapes rapidly going to rust, are demolished and bulldozed into the landfill of failing memory.
While continuing to pursue the mystery surrounding Lester’s death, the novel also seems to be setting up as a confrontation between what might be called history in a minor key – inherited understandings and values, stereotype-generating events and icons, cultural shibboleths – and an event of such monstrous proportions that it literally stops time and history in their tracks.
As the middle third of the novel progresses, the plot not only accumulates murder suspects at a rate of practically one to a page but also seems utterly helpless to prevent Bleeding Edge going off the rails completely on wild yet somehow related tangents: the prose thickens with the vocabulary of dot.com techno-babble, colloquial turns of phrase, memes from fin de siècle pop culture, online chatter, red herrings, conspiracy theories and of course, this being Pynchon, lengthy paranoid episodes and asides along the way.
A substantial part of the effort here seems intended to lull us into falling for the book as a kind of highbrow caper: regardless of whether we are caught in the verbal crossfire of a family evening with Maxi’s parents or trying to decipher geek speak dating back over a decade we willingly go along if only for the snap, crackle and pop of Pynchon’s double entendres, his lightning-quick shifts in register and his peerless channeling of Raymond Chandler.
Suddenly, upon turning a page, the events of 9/11 drop randomly into the text and set the scattershot narrative back on its tracks: the prose, heretofore shuffled in and out of a cluster of competing voices, is stripped all the way down to the point of almost petering out completely. The writing attempts to mirror an inchoate yet general disquiet: habit and convention fall by the wayside unable any longer to carry their own weight and for a maddening moment things are free to be seen again for the first time: time itself is caught fascinated and wide-eyed, now hostage to overwhelming shock and awe. In this “irony-free” heartland of the real which had been “unthinkable a year or two ago” our erstwhile irony-generating machines (humans) revert to duality-generating machines as cold war thinking makes an unlikely comeback. Much like the memories of the day itself and the weeks immediately thereafter, everybody is on edge and communications are predicated on urgency and necessity: not a lot of social conversation going on.
If 9/11 strikes the novel with the force of an enormously powerful de-ironizing vacuum then Pynchon seems to be hinting that the real events of that day, out in “meatspace,” had a similar impact on the inherited record: the clock is re-set and the question becomes how is this episode to be understood going forward. The crux of the novel is laid bare: 9/11 (Pynchon, perhaps trying to get some separation from the accepted 9/11 narrative, refers to 9/11 as “11 September”) is not only removed from or a gap in history it also forces history to come crashing back in: history is manufactured in and from out of that same instant.
Similar to the uncategorized terrain of the Deep Web (the pages of which do not exist unless they are dynamically created as the result of a specific web search) there is a sense in which this is history without a “history” – as if the moment itself had been reverse-engineered back to the point at which it is perhaps incapable of recognizing itself as present – as if it has taken leave of itself. Pynchon is drawing a parallel between the promise of release held out by the access DeepArcher allows and the limited-time-only opportunity to refuse the “infantile” narrative of official history presented by the events of 11 September. As Maxine says to Government operative:
…you took our own precious sorrow, processed it, sold it back to us like any other product.
The official packaging and dissemination of the narrative of 11 September and the coordinated resuscitation of the dream of consumer fulfillment that America holds out to her citizens are not the only objects of scorn – the novel also goes after the two Californians, Justin and Lucas. Asked if they designed DeepArcher to evolve, Justin answers:
No, it was only supposed to be the one thing, like, timeless? A refuge. History-free is what Lucas and I were hoping for.
Pynchon appears to be equally distrustful of all attempts to live outside of history, whether that be in “meatspace” or online – there perhaps was a window virtually for a moment but it closed and went into reverse: instead of providing access to a new frontier the web has become an enormous apparatus for gathering and analyzing data sourced in “meatspace.”
Presaging the rise of the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous who, in the years since 11 September 2001, have launched successful denial of service attacks on Governments, Corporations and Religions, one of the more radical characters wishes for enough good hackers interested in fighting back – and so we have come full circle: once again history is – officially and unofficially – conceived in terms of crosshatching dualities.
At different points in the novel, Pynchon plays with clichés and caricatures: whether it be the wordplay of an Italian-American friend of Maxi’s with its references to fading cultural icons and events or Maxi’s Jewish heritage and the funny almost Seinfeld-esque grab-and-take exchanges between her, her sister and her parents, Pynchon highlights efforts to maintain an open channel to the stacked depth of personal and cultural experiences of generations gone before in contrast to “some stupefied consensus about what life is to be.”
Foregrounding throughout the cadences and conceits of speech (that never quite harden into cliché) particular to New York’s founding races and ethnicities, Bleeding Edge champions an idea of history as minor, half-forgotten, unverifiable, practically insignificant but somehow not yet appropriated: true only to itself.
