THE LATE REVIEW: Bleeding Edge

Some disconnected thoughts:

How do we describe Thomas Pynchon?  How do we describe his work?  He fits no genre, we can’t say he’s a crime writer or a humourist or a historical writer even though he’s all three and many more. He’s a recluse who’s been a guest star on The Simpsons. Some of his books are small, slim things of compact beauty while others are massive, life-engulfing monsters that demand months of close attention. He looks – though photographs number no more than nine or ten, and most are from high school yearbooks or his naval days – like someone who’d have trouble with a Hardy Boys adventure, yet he’s written some of the finest books of the twentieth century.

There was a time when I was part of a book group, mainly for the food. Don’t judge me. The only book that nobody could get more than a few pages into – and bear in mind that most choices were of the Guardian persuasion, unreadable but fashionable South American over-cooked metaphor-heaps – was Pynchon’s Vineland. It was the only time I chose a book and I admit to doing so because my primary aim was to give them something to really chew on, without wanting to over-alienate with a Gravity’s Rainbow or a Mason & Dixon.

People, people I trusted, told me to read Pynchon. I finally succumbed and read The Crying of Lot 49 on a transatlantic flight. It was too short; too short for the flight and too short full stop. This was a strange new thing, full of darkness and fireworks, dragging the reader in with its eerie mystery and pushing them away with its impenetrable verbosity. Once the jetlag had dissipated, my hunt for more Pynchon was a parody of the search for V.

So what of Bleeding Edge? Do we turn Tom’s own taste for wordplay against it, rail that it isn’t a book about the frustrations of the lead singer in The Wedding Present, it isn’t Bleedin’ Gedge? Do we complain that the punnery is there for its own sake rather than as a sub-set of Pynchon stylistic tropes? There’s a line near the end of Bleeding Edge, conflating Scooby Doo with a drugs cartel, that you just know had Tom smacking his hands together as he wrote it, telling himself that this was the one that’d make half his readers say ‘No. That’s too much, even for you.’

Or do we say that this time, the plot, in none of his books anything more substantial than a 70s Mystery Movie – and which this time is a 00s Mystery Movie - never anything more than an armature on which to hang the dazzle and the flash and the songs and the layers of astonishment … This time, it’s barely there. It doesn’t happen. Narrative, always a thing the reader has to winnow out from the circus going on around him, is mainly imparted from character’s words; the largest event of the 20^ist century so far – and Bleeding Edge is most certainly Pynchon’s take on the 21^st century so far – happens in a single line. I think that’s a good choice, though; it doesn’t need more.

There’s a feeling one gets as life goes on; a sense that time speeds up and each consecutive year gets that bit shorter. Each book from Pynchon now is seen as a treat, each one may well be the last – he’s 77 - his schedule speeding up from ‘a book whenever he feels like it’ to ‘very nearly a book every couple of years’. Accompanying this, there’s the realisation that his books have been pinging backwards and forwards through time, from Mason & Dixon through Gravity’s Rainbow to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, settings moving from the 1780s to 2001, and with each passing book the period between each shrinks ever smaller, time speeding up until it catches both author and reader.

The problem with Bleeding Edge is this: the narrative is propelled mainly by dialogue and interaction, but the characters are interchangeable and near-indistinguishable. Everybody seems to be delivering schtick rather than talking, each of them representing a different aspect of culture or technology at the meeting of two centuries, each of them a collection of references rather than a personality.

Talking of references: only in a Pynchon would you get Pokemon and SZ Sakall mentioned within twenty words of each other.

But this is pretty much the point. This is, after all, what a Pynchon book is for. Don’t come to him for crystalline prose or tight plot structure, because his work is, more than anyone else’s I can think of, designed to sprawl, to digress, to go off into unexpected places. Leave your map behind, sit back, enjoy the pyrotechnics. And if you ever see him, try to get a photo.