Difference between revisions of "Bleeding Edge"

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−	<div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em">"Under the paving stones, the beach!" - Graffito, Paris, 1968</div>	+	<div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em">"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." &#150; Donald E. Westlake</div>
−	[[image:BE-novel-cover.jpg|200px|thumb|''Bleeding Edge''<br />'''Cover design:'''<br />Tal Goretsky/Darren Haggar<br />'''Jacket Image:'''<br />Darshan Zenith/Cruiser Art<br />'''Publication date:''' Aug 4, 2009|right]] Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.	+	[[File:BE-Final-Cover.jpg|350px|thumb|''Bleeding Edge''<br />'''Cover design:''' Evan Gaffney<br />'''Jacket Image:''' Luis Martinez/LuisMMolina//Getty Images<br />'''Publication date:''' Sep 17, 2013|right]] It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.
−	It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.	+	Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics — carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts — without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom — two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex- husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood — till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.
−	In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there ... or ... if you were there, then you ... or, wait, is it ...	+	With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.
		+
		+	Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
		+
		+	Hey. Who wants to know?
	&mdash; [[Thomas Pynchon]]		&mdash; [[Thomas Pynchon]]
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	* [[Bleeding Edge description|More on the book description]]		* [[Bleeding Edge description|More on the book description]]
	* [[Errata]]		* [[Errata]]
		+
		+	==Jonathan Cape Edition &#150; United Kingdom==
		+	'''Published:''' September 17, 2013
		+
		+	'''Cover:''' Same as the Penguin Books cover, BUT without the cool refracting color effect. The Jonathan Cape edition is flat grayscale.
		+
		+	'''Pagination:''' Same as the Penguin Books edition, 477 pages.

---

Latest revision as of 13:10, 24 September 2013

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics — carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts — without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom — two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex- husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood — till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

— Thomas Pynchon

• Cover analysis
• Title speculations
• More on the book description
• Errata

Jonathan Cape Edition – United Kingdom

Published: September 17, 2013

Cover: Same as the Penguin Books cover, BUT without the cool refracting color effect. The Jonathan Cape edition is flat grayscale.

Pagination: Same as the Penguin Books edition, 477 pages.