Book Review: How Thomas Pynchon's Novel Bleeding Edge Hit Close to Home

When the miasmic shitstorm of authoritarianism and real-life Idiocracy gained full force earlier this year, I felt compelled to dive into Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in search of informed, anti-authoritarian entertainment and guidance. The novel mostly takes place in the year 1984 (a recent edition of Orwell's 1984 has an introduction from Pynchon) depicting Californians fleeing the militarized police state carrying out Reagan's war on drugs, with frequent flashbacks to the impact of COINTELPRO's insidious dismantling of resistance movements in the 60s. It sounds dark and bleak, but Vineland is a hilarious and uplifting adventure.

Nobody does it like Pynchon. His works feel like an essential road map for navigating our contemporary political madness. It seems every damn dumb, absurd or gross thing that unfolds in the Trumpocalyptic age begs the question of whether this is actually Thomas Pynchon's world and we're all just living in it. Even the fucking names! When I saw that the source behind a recent NSA leak was a 20-something blonde girl from Texas named Reality Leigh Winner, I thought: go home Thomas Pynchon, you're drunk!

I've been seeing tweets like this every day:

tony "the mooch" scaramucci cucks reince priebus? the new pynchon sounds 🔥

— nick laureano (@nick_laureano14) July 27, 2017

fitting that all trump associates look like they could be a pynchon character named wolf smilestein or something pic.twitter.com/HCtZRfsjw2

— john (@john__wallace) July 15, 2017

After zipping through Vineland, I was craving more Pynchon but had my own anti-authoritarian writing to do, an essay on the treatment of warfare and invasion in Finnegans Wake for the Diasporic Joyce Conference in Toronto (an experience chronicled here). Once that was completed, I took a much-needed break from Joyce to crack open Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, and holy shit what a treat it turned out to be.

Bleeding Edge completely stunned me. Not only is it a funny and engrossing web of stories carried by characters engaged in sharp, witty dialogue, but also the setting of turn-of-the-millennium New York City spoke directly to me and my background in a way Pynchon's work never has before. More than anything else, the prime display of the master author's precisely researched rendering of setting just blew me away. Pynchon was born in 1937, a year after my dad. He's a pretty old dude. Yet the cultural milieu he recreates out of the minutia of video games, TV shows, internet culture, rap music, pro sports, etc from that 9/11 time period in Bleeding Edge (published in 2013) suggests an old man who's as with-the-times as anybody alive. He references Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, for instance, and describes nuances of the Metal Gear Solid video games in such shocking detail that one internet reader suggested the only explanation is he must've had input from his then-teenage son. The book is littered with nuggets of culture like a character holding "a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER." (p. 77)

That mug appears in a scene with weed smoke hovering in a hacker's lair, as our protagonist Maxine Tarnow explores the dimensions of her techy friends' creation called DeepArcher, a sort of cross between virtual reality and online multiplayer games. Maxine (who Pynchon helpfully describes as a Rachel Weisz doppelgänger early in the novel) is a fraud investigator in Manhattan in the years following the dot-com bubble, hot on the trail of a shady Internet security firm called "hashslingerz," itself a sort of pun encompassing Pynchon's penchant for pot references and the term hash used for computer coding. This is a novel full of tech geeks, subversive bloggers, radical filmmakers, hackers, stoners, Mossad agents, Russian mobsters, shadow government assassins, and every other variety of spooks and weirdos. A typically Pynchonian web of colorful characters expanding so far out that I finally had to jot down a who's-who primer in the back of the book.

A book jacket blurb mentioned that, "We are all characters in Pynchon's mad world" and that starts to feel true. He creates such a broad network of characters, male and female, with all range of backgrounds and quirks, that I begin to see myself and my friends appearing in there. That's part of what is so special about Pynchon---his fiction hems fairly close to realism while always keeping things zany, off-beat, and funky with every person, place, and thing having some deliberately weird or funny name (I burst out laughing on a flight when I read of a strip club called "Joie de Beavre") so that you eventually start to view this world a little differently, noticing its inherent weirdness.

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World Trade Center Memories

Yesterday I took part in my second (official) fantasy football draft in nine years. The first one had been back in September of 2001. I was 16 years old and my brother John had invited me to join a fantasy football league with his friends, the draft to take place at one of their apartments in lower Manhattan. On Saturday night, September 8th, we gathered in the living room of a relatively small but nice apartment and had our draft. I was by far the youngest person in the group. We put our names in a hat and chose randomly to determine the draft order. Somehow, I ended up with the #1 pick. I took Rams running back and all-around superstar Marshall Faulk. He would end up winning the league for me that year, bringing home a pot of almost a thousand dollars.

What I remember most about that evening was the drive home. As we curled around from the West Side Highway to the Battery Tunnel entrance, I stared upwards out the window at the enormous gold-lit glistening towers that hovered above.

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My grandfather started his own business, a customs brokerage firm, at the old Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House back in 1968. The same building is now the National Museum of the American Indian. I remember it most for its role in Ghostbusters 2 where the ghostbusting crew defeated the terrible ghost Vigo the Carpathian. Vigo was a ghost from the 17th Century trapped inside of a menacing-looking painting. That movie came out when I was 4 years old and occupied a major role in my life for years to come. Every time I would pass by that old Custom House building I'd remember how my mom and my brother John used to tell me they'd seen the camera crews filming scenes there, especially the scene where they covered the entire building with pink slime---which was in reality one big plastic bag.

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When construction on the Twin Towers was completed in 1972, my grandfather moved his business into an office space on the 21st floor of the North Tower. The business remained there for the next twenty years. Both my mother and my brother John took jobs with his company and I have great memories, some of my earliest memories in fact, of spending time in that office, staring out the narrow windows in my mom's office at the people on the ground who looked like ants. I perfectly remember the lunch room which had chairs like movie director chairs. My grandfather's office was mostly dark green rug and leather seats. His desk was made of dark shiny wood and it was always covered with huge stacks of papers. And I'll always remember Phil. Phil Jackson. A smooth-talking, funny, tall lanky black man, Phil was the office messenger and he always wore a baseball hat and always entertained my siblings and me whenever my mom brought us to work.

*   *   *
When my grandfather died, he left the business to his greedy second wife and a rift split apart my family from the business. My mom and brother John (and a few other folks from the old company) started working with a new company located a bit further downtown, right on Battery Place, just a block or two away from the old U.S. Customs House building. With the new company, my mom (who held a pretty prominent managerial position) had maintained a working relationship with another business that was on the 89th floor of the North Tower. When I'd go in to work with her we would sometimes walk over to the World Trade Center and I'd get to see the amazing view from that 89th floor office. The guy in charge was Albert, a super nice man with a warm personality. Behind his desk was a large set of windows that overlooked the sprawl of Manhattan. It was absolutely stunning. Whenever I'd go up there and see that view I had chills and an experience of what I now realize was "sublime." Awe-inspiring. It was almost too much to behold. It felt as though you could reach out and touch the Empire State Building which was really about 3 miles north.

During the summer that I turned 14, my mom hired me for my first job ever: messenger. My old pal Phil Jackson, who was part of the crew that had moved to this new company, showed me the ropes for about a week. My job was to take documents from the office on Battery Place and walk around downtown Manhattan bringing the documents to their destinations. One of those destinations, a daily regular, was Albert's office on the 89th floor of the World Trade Center. You had to take two elevators to get up to the 89th floor and in between there was a sky lobby with a stunning view and I'd often stare out the window for a while. Since I'd usually bring their documents around lunch time, I would really milk the time (I was working for my mom after all) and explore, hang out, go to Borders bookstore, look for new Wu-Tang cds at the Sam Goody in the underground mall, and sometimes just roam amidst the buildings. I can remember days when I'd sit in that beautiful plaza in between the towers, I'd peoplewatch and write down stories in a marble notebook. I always ate pizza at Bari's Pizza on Greenwich Street, played chess in Zuccotti Park, bought comic books from the street vendors on Church Street. It was really a beautiful time in my life and I have great memories of it. Unfortunately (maybe because I was basically being paid to roam the streets everyday) I was never hired back after that summer.

But on my last day of work that summer (it was 1999), my dad came in to the city from Staten Island to meet my mom and me after work and we all went up to the observation deck atop the South Tower. Afterwards we ate pizza for dinner at Bari's.

*   *   *
My last job before moving to San Diego was an accounting position in Piscataway, New Jersey. The exit I got off at to go to work was the same as the one for Rutgers University. At the time, Rutgers had a superstar running back leading their football team back to respectability after over a decade of losing seasons. His name was Ray Rice and in April 2008, just two months before I would leave my Piscataway job, he was selected by the Ravens in the NFL Draft.

Now, Rice is one of the best running backs in the NFL and I was coveting him in my draft yesterday. I got him with my #1 pick.