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jbrown2140 's review for:
Bleeding Edge
by Thomas Pynchon
Of all the 9/11 books I've read, this is probably the most honest and non-anachronistic. The Jonathan Safron Foer book, for example, retroactively applied the hagiographic 9/11 mentality to all its characters. This one doesn't do that, which is good. It's ironic that a surrealistic novel would be more realistic, but that's how I see it (same story with the Updike and Delillo efforts, though the latter was better than the former).
Still, this book was a bit less than mind-blowing. I get that Pynchon sort of created this genre of detective-story turned postmodern exploration of subculture, culture, politics, etc. The trouble is he's run out of ways to make it fresh. There were lots of times while reading this that I thought "this sounds like worse Daid Foster Wallace" (there are even random Quebecois...). Or the Coen Brothers. Both this book and Pynchon's last - Inherent Vice - seemed like not-quite-as-interesting versions of "The Big Lebowski."
I did appreciate all the tech-bubble stuff, as it served to remind us how vapid our culture and politics were just prior to 9/11, and, by implication, just how vapid a state they've reverted back to. But then, maybe I didn't need a novel to teach me that.
Still, this book was a bit less than mind-blowing. I get that Pynchon sort of created this genre of detective-story turned postmodern exploration of subculture, culture, politics, etc. The trouble is he's run out of ways to make it fresh. There were lots of times while reading this that I thought "this sounds like worse Daid Foster Wallace" (there are even random Quebecois...). Or the Coen Brothers. Both this book and Pynchon's last - Inherent Vice - seemed like not-quite-as-interesting versions of "The Big Lebowski."
I did appreciate all the tech-bubble stuff, as it served to remind us how vapid our culture and politics were just prior to 9/11, and, by implication, just how vapid a state they've reverted back to. But then, maybe I didn't need a novel to teach me that.