A review by mayoroffailure
Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon
2.0
When you consent to read a Thomas Pynchon novel you essentially consent to be taken for a ride. A ride that goes both everywhere and nowhere. It introduces you to a set of wacky characters, explores ideas, and overall makes you a somewhat different person once you're done. He's an author known for his crazy plot-lines and characters, dense language, and hard to decipher morals and themes. Bleeding Edge, however, feels like Mr. Pynchon trying to parody himself, and as a result, the true joy of his books is lost in this latest addition.
To best explain my thoughts on this book I think that comparing it to his previous novel, Inherent Vice, is probably the best way to go forward. Inherent Vice is a book that has grown on me the longer I've thought about it. I initially complained about the over saturation of characters and story lines but with more time and reflection I think it was used to make the reader just as confused as the protagonist. In other words, his style served an actual purpose in telling the story.
Bleeding Edge takes what Inherent Vice did and turns it up to eleven. Both novels take place in a very specific period of time, both feature a private investigator, both stories center around the newest investigation the protagonist has taken on, both have numerous characters who are friends with the protagonist that assist them in their investigation, and both have a massive number of side plots that intertwine with the main story. Inherent Vice takes all of these elements and uses them in service of the narrative, but Bleeding Edge uses them and just creates a muddled mess.
I have no idea what really happened in this novel, I can tell you what happened at parts, I can describe specific scenes to you, but I can not tell you what Mr. Pynchon was going for with this latest effort. It has elements that would make you believe it's a study of a time period, it has elements that paint it as a cautionary tale to a future full of technology, the problem is the lack of focus. It seems that from one day to the next he just wrote whatever he wanted, added in whatever plots he thought of, characters that came into his head, and at the end didn't even do much to tie it together.
The conflict that starts the story revolves around a tech company CEO. Our protagonist is hired to look into the corporation and figure out if anything illegal is going on. This plot line is started, stopped, eventually dropped completely, and then reintroduced for the last thirty pages. There is no resolution, at all. We never learn if he broke the law, and we never learn if it was truly him that orchestrated 911, all we get to know is that he's a bad guy.
Inherent Vice had the disappearance of a wealthy land developer to start its main conflict. Throughout the introduction of new plots and new characters the protagonist is always moving towards solving the main conflict, he never declares that he's abandoned the case. In the end, we learn that the land developer was thrown into a looney bin by the government to keep him from giving away land to hippies, there is an actual resolution to the story. There is set-up in the beginning and we get the payoff at the end of the book.
Bleeding Edge does none of this. Whole chunks of the book completely diverge from the main story, whole new characters are introduced for those chunks, and nothing is fleshed out to the point where the reader can fully understand. Worst of all, in my mind, are the random emotions that crop up for no explainable reason. There is an emotional core to Inherent Vice, and it's the protagonist's desire to rekindle his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. We root for that relationship and it feels real through the entire book. Bleeding Edge has no emotional core, and our protagonist seems to get sexual with just about every somewhat major male character, and in the end feels completely unearned emotions towards someone she talked about with contempt over and over earlier in the story.
Perhaps the worst part of this book is that, dare I say, it's pretentious. Mr. Pynchon is not a writer for everyone, and if you go online you'll find whole communities dedicated to dissecting his books to find the meaning behind them, in other words, you have to "understand" him. So what happens when a true "artist" makes something that makes no sense? There's something wrong with you, not the author, and not the book. Many will tell critics that they just don't "understand" Pynchon, it's like a fine wine or modern art. If your not highbrow enough you just won't get it.
I've read many reviews here and on other sites praising the book, and I think it's because they don't want to appear like they don't "understand" highbrow art. This is not a good book, it has good elements, but it's a cheap re-write of Inherent Vice. If you didn't get this book, its okay, you don't need to act like it's better than it is, and unless you're seeking to be a Pynchon completist, you should just go read Inherent Vice.
To best explain my thoughts on this book I think that comparing it to his previous novel, Inherent Vice, is probably the best way to go forward. Inherent Vice is a book that has grown on me the longer I've thought about it. I initially complained about the over saturation of characters and story lines but with more time and reflection I think it was used to make the reader just as confused as the protagonist. In other words, his style served an actual purpose in telling the story.
Bleeding Edge takes what Inherent Vice did and turns it up to eleven. Both novels take place in a very specific period of time, both feature a private investigator, both stories center around the newest investigation the protagonist has taken on, both have numerous characters who are friends with the protagonist that assist them in their investigation, and both have a massive number of side plots that intertwine with the main story. Inherent Vice takes all of these elements and uses them in service of the narrative, but Bleeding Edge uses them and just creates a muddled mess.
I have no idea what really happened in this novel, I can tell you what happened at parts, I can describe specific scenes to you, but I can not tell you what Mr. Pynchon was going for with this latest effort. It has elements that would make you believe it's a study of a time period, it has elements that paint it as a cautionary tale to a future full of technology, the problem is the lack of focus. It seems that from one day to the next he just wrote whatever he wanted, added in whatever plots he thought of, characters that came into his head, and at the end didn't even do much to tie it together.
The conflict that starts the story revolves around a tech company CEO. Our protagonist is hired to look into the corporation and figure out if anything illegal is going on. This plot line is started, stopped, eventually dropped completely, and then reintroduced for the last thirty pages. There is no resolution, at all. We never learn if he broke the law, and we never learn if it was truly him that orchestrated 911, all we get to know is that he's a bad guy.
Inherent Vice had the disappearance of a wealthy land developer to start its main conflict. Throughout the introduction of new plots and new characters the protagonist is always moving towards solving the main conflict, he never declares that he's abandoned the case. In the end, we learn that the land developer was thrown into a looney bin by the government to keep him from giving away land to hippies, there is an actual resolution to the story. There is set-up in the beginning and we get the payoff at the end of the book.
Bleeding Edge does none of this. Whole chunks of the book completely diverge from the main story, whole new characters are introduced for those chunks, and nothing is fleshed out to the point where the reader can fully understand. Worst of all, in my mind, are the random emotions that crop up for no explainable reason. There is an emotional core to Inherent Vice, and it's the protagonist's desire to rekindle his relationship with his ex-girlfriend. We root for that relationship and it feels real through the entire book. Bleeding Edge has no emotional core, and our protagonist seems to get sexual with just about every somewhat major male character, and in the end feels completely unearned emotions towards someone she talked about with contempt over and over earlier in the story.
Perhaps the worst part of this book is that, dare I say, it's pretentious. Mr. Pynchon is not a writer for everyone, and if you go online you'll find whole communities dedicated to dissecting his books to find the meaning behind them, in other words, you have to "understand" him. So what happens when a true "artist" makes something that makes no sense? There's something wrong with you, not the author, and not the book. Many will tell critics that they just don't "understand" Pynchon, it's like a fine wine or modern art. If your not highbrow enough you just won't get it.
I've read many reviews here and on other sites praising the book, and I think it's because they don't want to appear like they don't "understand" highbrow art. This is not a good book, it has good elements, but it's a cheap re-write of Inherent Vice. If you didn't get this book, its okay, you don't need to act like it's better than it is, and unless you're seeking to be a Pynchon completist, you should just go read Inherent Vice.