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As for the curriculum, 'each grade level would be regarded as a different kind of mental condition and managed accordingly. It seemed to him obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day.' Kugelblitz, we are told, emigrated to the U.S., built a practice, and some of his patients got together enough money to get the school off the ground. Maxine's sons attend The Otto Kugelblitz School, 'named for an early psychoanalyst who was expelled from Freud's inner circle. And, of course, knowing what we know, the city has a particular fragility about it, invisible to the characters but not to us. After a while, though, I felt a little exhausted by the sheer volume of references to things I never thought I'd have to think about again, or to made-up things that, if they existed, I would never want to think about again either.ĭescriptions of Maxine's New York, however, are gratifying for their sheer inventiveness and wit.

Pynchon even includes all the lyrics to several different made-up songs, among them a clever ballad from a fake off-Broadway musical called Amy and Joey, about Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, two lurid names from the past that are tailor-made for the Internet's permanent amber.

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A lot of the nonstop references in this book are jokey fabrications, such as a Lifetime movie called Her Psychopathic Fiancé, and a TV show called Fraudbusters. You know how the facts and opinions collect around you, but you can't really look away? You can feel partly like you're wasting your time, and partly like you're getting a crash course in life. In fact, much of the novel reminds me of what it feels like to sort of roam around the Internet all day. 11 and its attendant paranoia here - and he is very good with paranoia - but he's also taking on the Internet and his catalog of a mind is well-suited to it. The novel builds up toward those frantic, surreal days in New York after the destruction of the towers, and that event provides it with an organizing principle - at least, sort of. Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, is about a spunky Upper West Side mom named Maxine Tarnow who runs a fraud-investigating agency called Tail 'Em and Nail 'Em, and who gets involved in all kinds of intrepid activities back in the era after the collapse of the dot-com boom, and leading up to and following Sept. Because is the point of a book that the thing be easy to understand and shapely and perfect? Or can it be peculiar and high IQ-ish and drenched in a singular sensibility that we know of as Pynchon's Own? (Kind of like Newman's Own, but with literature, not salad dressing.) Is that ever enough? I had to tell myself: Thomas Pynchon is throwing this at me, and therefore, I'm just going to let it pile up and see what it is. Pynchon has a mind that offers up deep and compelling pleasures, and also requires a lot of patience, not to mention a resistance to skipping pages while a lot of random-seeming stuff is thrown at you. So I tried to ignore the reputation and the legions of devoted readers and the semi-reclusiveness of the writer, and just look at the work.

If you read the thoughtful and detailed writing by Pynchon devotees, they make a very persuasive case.īut the truth is, the most persuasive case made for any writer is never made by his or her fans, but by the work itself. How do you write about the iconic novelist Thomas Pynchon, whose books are strange and difficult things, and whose die-hard readers gather online to wax poetic, and use words like Pynchonian, Pynchonalia and Pynchonesque? They are just so into him, and often so articulate about their love. I approached this review with a little bit of dread.