Pynchon makes clear that its promise was always illusory.
#BLEEDING EDGE BY THOMAS PYNCHON FREE#
In spite of the DeepArcher creators’ West Coast hippie-hacker ethos of a free space beyond the reaches of corporations or surveillance, Mr.
Pynchon, the hopes embodied by the untouched frontier, whether terrestrial or virtual, are dashed the moment it is explored. Pynchon’s treatment of the Deep Web is less Gravity’s Rainbow, which renders the military-industrial complex of World War II with a specialist’s knowledge of engineering and physics, than Mason & Dixon: For Mr. The counterpoint to the arch-capitalist enterprise of hashslingerz is DeepArcher, the Internet underworld that lies beneath the surface web of indexed, searchable pages. Pynchon’s novels, plot is something of a secondary consideration, a loose scaffolding that serves as little more than a pretext to reconstruct, in exacting detail, the particular milieu of New York at the dawn of the new millennium, replete with recent Silicon Valley transplants still idealistic about the utopian potential of the open Web, Russian mobsters, old-school Upper West Side Trotskyites, dizzyingly wealthy venture capitalists and Rudy Giuliani. Her investigation of its accounting irregularities predictably spirals out into an unruly web of murder mysteries, Mideast money laundering, and mergers and acquisitions that never quite resolves itself. Within the first 10 pages, Maxine is introduced to computer-security firm hashslingerz, headed by the obviously nefarious Gabriel Ice. The tension between Maxine’s two seemingly irreconcilable shticks-as a card-carrying member of “Yentas with Attitude” coordinating playdates and packed lunches (she’s recently separated from her husband), and a Beretta-toting “Certified Fraud Examiner gone rogue”-is often marshaled to comic effect: At one point, she employs pole-dancing skills, originally honed at a faddish exercise class, at a seedy outer-borough strip club with the characteristically Pynchonian name “Joie de Beavre,” masquerading as a “MILF night” stripper in pursuit of a source. Bleeding Edge opens in spring of that year, with Maxine Tarnow, the proprietor of the “Nail ’Em and Tail ’Em” fraud investigation agency, walking her sons to their “Yupper West Side” private school.
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