Bleeding Edge (Pynchon) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Exemplary...dazzling and ludicrous...Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn't anomie but delight. Pynchon himself's a good companion, full of real affectation for his people and places, even as he lampoons them for suffering the postmodern condition of being only partly real.
Jonathan Lethem - New York Times Book Review


Brilliantly written...a joy to read...Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post


A book that fights mightily against the landfill by taking all the random pieces of that wastrel-conman era and putting them into a plot that is both ridiculous and far too close to reality to laugh at without a back-draft of dread.
Boston Globe


It's fitting that Pynchon is tackling the near-present, because the real world has all but overtaken his elaborate, far-out fictions. Paranoia, conspiracy, electronic connection, government surveillance—there's nothing like reading a Pynchon novel while new revelations about the NSA are popping up on your cellphone.
Los Angeles Times


The truth is, Pynchon writes like no one else. He somehow injects love and humanity as the antidote to the dehumanization he fears and obsesses about. He convincingly warp-speeds from one setting and characters to another within the same sentence. Even in his hyper-narrative ways, he remains the master of phrasing—cool, hip, explosive narrative fragments overstuffed with meaning...If you're willing to enter this bleeding-edge (def: more advanced and riskier than cutting-edge) novel, figure to come out the back page a different reader, probably better off.
USA Today


Surely now Pynchon must be in line for the Nobel Prize?... Thomas Pynchon, America's greatest novelist, has written the greatest novel about the most significant events in his country's 21st century history. It is unequivocally a masterpiece.
Scotsman (UK)


A pitch-perfect portrait of pre-9/11, pre-social media New York that's both seductive and impossibly innocent.
Vogue


Brilliant and wonderful.... Bleeding Edge chronicles the birth of the now—our terrorism-obsessed, NSA-everywhere, smartphone Panopticon zeitgeist—in the crash of the towers. It connects the dots, the packets, the pixels. We are all part of this story. We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world. Bleeding Edge is a novel about geeks, the Internet, New York and 9/11. It is funny, sad, paranoid and lyrical. It was difficult to put down. I want to read it again.
Slate.com


The book's real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century...As usual, Pynchon doesn't provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.
Wired Magazine


Where Vineland slyly set a story of Orwellian government surveillance in 1984, Bleeding Edge situates a fable of increasingly sentient computers in, naturally, 2001. Of course, the year 2001 means something besides HAL and Dave now.... The plot's dizzying profusion of murder suspects plays like something out of early Raymond Chandler....but no one rivals Pynchon's range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Maxine [Tarnow's] investigations lead her to hashslingrz monomaniac Gabriel Ice; Igor, a Russian mafioso with a conscience; two rap-spouting sidekicks named Misha and Grisha; government agent Windust, a murderer and torturer....and many more. [A]uthentic, deeply connected characters, all heightened by Pynchon's darkly hilarious way with language and located on the "bleeding edge" as the world changed. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Pynchon makes a much-anticipated return, and it's trademark stuff: a blend of existential angst, goofy humor and broad-sweeping bad vibes.... [T]here's paranoia aplenty to be had in Pynchon's saute pan, served up in the dark era of the 9/11 attack, the dot-com meltdown and the Patriot Act.... [B]ut Pynchon has long managed to blend his particularly bleak view of latter-day humankind with...true humor in our foibles.
Kirkus Reviews