Recently read: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon - #conspiracy #review #reality

By Lisabet Sarai

It’s early 2001 in New York. Divorced Jewish mother Maxine Tarnow used to be a certified fraud investigator, until she skated too close to the dark side and lost her license. That hasn’t diminished the reputation of Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em, the firm she runs out of a small Upper West Side office. Indeed, she’s seems to be in greater demand than ever, by clients with tangled connections to various dubiously legal activities, and to each other. In the wake of the dot-com collapse, the city’s investors, entrepreneurs and hackers are all scrambling to save themselves. They’ll stoop to anything to keep their heads above water: embezzlement, drug-running, money laundering, weapons smuggling, even murder. They’re doing deals with crime bosses, foreign spies, terrorists and the Feds, losing themselves and their souls in real and simulated conspiracies, hiding out in underground bunkers and on the Dark Web, in the vast reaches of cyberspace where commercialism hasn’t yet penetrated.

Like a spider in its web, geek billionaire Gabriel Ice lies at the heart of these plots and counter-plots, pulling strings and making plans. All Maxine’s contacts — video-pirate- turned-film-maker Reg Despard, sleazy venture capitalist Rocky Slagiatt, Russian agent Igor Dashkov, crooked accountant Lester Traipse, neo-con operative Nicholas Windust, even Maxi’s best friend Heidi — are somehow linked to Ice and his paradoxically profitable company hashslingrz.com. At the same time, Maxine appears to be a nexus herself, as these varied characters explode into her life, dragging her on midnight boat trips to vast harborside landfills, pulling her into drunken and drug-infused parties, convincing her to take a turn on the stage at a strip club. Mysterious USB memory sticks and DVDs are delivered to her, full of classified dossiers and videos taken by hidden cameras. As she struggles to make sense of what’s going on, threats pile up, people around her die or disappear, and finally, two planes barrel into the World Trade Center, turning it to a cloud a toxic dust.

I realize that as a summary, the above paragraphs seem pretty incoherent. I’m trying to capture the delirious, frantic, nearly overwhelming complexity of Bleeding Edge. This brilliant, funny, frightening book is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, but it’s almost impossible to describe. What is it “about”? The raw wound in the American psyche ripped open by 9/11? The vanishing of the beloved and familiar in New York, and by extension, everywhere? The co-opting of the Internet and every other type of media? The gutted dream of freedom, personal responsibility, even personal agency? The nature of reality?

All of the above. Bleeding Edge casts a gritty, ironic spotlight on our times (and despite the supposedly historical references, the book is definitely a commentary on our times, not the early years of the century). Yet it has touches of magical realism, as Maxine catches glimpses of the dead and experiences the occasional revelation. It’s also hilarious, with acerbic dialogue and perfectly-pitched cultural nuance.

Maxine herself is a delight, a tough, smart, compassionate, sentimental Yenta who’s also a sexy MILF. Though disturbed by the chaos around her, visited by dark, twisted dreams whose meaning eludes her, she somehow remains centered. She takes shopping to the level of an art, knows where to find the best bagels, mothers her two sons without smothering them. At the same time, she packs a revolver in her handbag and hardly thinks twice about kicking off her shoes to satisfy a foot fetishist.

Let me warn you; once you begin reading this book, you’re committed. One review on Amazon commented that Pynchon demands your full attention. I wholeheartedly agree. The sheer number of characters means you’re likely to forget who’s who if you take a break to sample something else. I put the novel down for a few weeks and found I needed to start from the beginning. The book is not exactly difficult (though Pynchon has that reputation), but it’s so rich it may spoil your appetite for other fiction.

How can I summarize a rollicking, provocative, pyrotechnic masterpiece like Bleeding Edge? I can’t. All I can do is urge you to read it.

Traveling, Reading

By Lisabet Sarai

I am writing this two weeks ahead of time because on the day it posts, I’ll be far away from my home and my computer. I’ll be traveling for twelve days, and I won’t be able to access the blog, even to reply to comments.

So far in advance, I’m not sure what I’ll be reading, but I know I will be reading. Indeed, reading is one of the joys of being on the road. A fourteen hour plane trip provides a lot of opportunities to lose oneself in a book—not to mention the hours waiting to board or to make connections. I may be doing an all-day train ride as well. Meanwhile, since I’ll be in a rural area at least part of the time, I expect that there will few activities in the evenings to compete with reading.

What will I bring with me? Well, my tablet, of course, stuffed with at least two dozen titles, many of them erotica. Thank heavens for e-books. They definitely lighten my luggage!

I’ll also be carrying George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the last (so far) volume in the Game of Thrones series. I’ve been rationing my consumption of that series, saving it for long journeys. I read the first half of this volume (five hundred plus pages) on my last international odyssey. I’ll finish it on this one, then feel frustrated, I’m sure, because just like real life, these books never tie up the loose ends.

That won’t be enough, though. After a while, I get tired of reading on a screen. I’m sure I’ll want to bring at least a few more print books, even with our limited luggage allowance (low cost airlines... argh!) But which ones?

At the moment, there are all sorts of candidates on my bookshelf. Riven Rock by T.C. Boyle. Sweet Caress by William Boyd. Books by Umberto Eco and John Crowley, Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie, not to mention half a dozen titles from Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series and (as a stark contrast) Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Lots of less well known writers, too—we have access to some excellent used book stores!

One needs to use special criteria choosing books for travel. They need to long enough to justify carrying them, but small enough not to take up too much space. I look for books that will really hook me and pull me in, to distract me from delays, backaches, hunger, bad smells, and other inevitabilities of travel. At the same time, for me at least, a travel book can’t be too intense, complex or intellectual. I’d rather read those books at home, where I have a wider selection and can put them down to pick up something else.

Anyway, I really can’t tell you in any detail what I’ll be reading as you read this. Very likely, though, I’ll be enjoying it.

Psychedelic Noir

By Lisabet Sarai

For the next two weeks, the denizens here at the Grip will be talking about our recent reading. I'm thrilled. Back at beginning of February, I finished Thomas Pyncheon's wonderful and bizarre novel Inherent Vice, but I just haven't had the time to write the review it deserves. Now I have additional motivation, although I doubt I can thoroughly convey the sheer brilliance of this literary gem.

Despite his stellar reputation, I am not in general a fan of Pynchon's work. On my husband's enthusiastic recommendation, I struggled through The Crying of Lot 49. I still can't tell you what the book is about, except that it has something to do with postal stamps. I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow and gave up. Pynchon's lengthy sentences and stream of consciousness style gave me a headache. The feeling that I'm too stupid to understand a book really ruins my reading pleasure.

Hence, when K. picked up Inherent Vice at our favorite used bookstore, I figured this was one book we wouldn't share. As he made his way through the neon-jacketed novel, snorting with amazement, chuckling with amusement and occasionally quoting outrageous passages, I changed my mind.

I'm so glad I did.

Inherent Vice, set in lurid, smoggy Los Angeles in the late sixties, follows the path of Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippy stoner hanging out by the beach who just happens to make a living as a private eye. Doc's a hapless, big-hearted lunk with a sharp eye, even when under the influence of various pharmaceutical products, and a terrible fashion sense. One day – yes, you've got it – a lady walks into his down-at-the-heels office. The sexy femme's not a stranger, though. Shasta Fay is Larry's ex-lover and she needs his help. She's fallen in love with a married, billionaire property developer, and she suspects there's some plot against Mickey's life. Agreeing to make some pro bono inquiries for old time's sake, Doc soon finds himself enmeshed in illegal, evil and just plain weird activities involving murderous bikers, slutty stewardesses, heroin addicts, zombie rock and rollers, drug-inspired psychics, perverted dentists, kinky heiresses, gay ex-cons, crooked police and a vicious, shadowy organization called the Golden Fang. The PI navigates this maze with calm aplomb, assisted by copious amounts of marijuana and other mind-altering substances.

With dozens of characters, some straight out of an album by Diane Arbus, and a plot that blossoms and fades like some acid dream, Inherent Vice nevertheless remains comprehensible. It is simultaneously a satirical paean to the sixties, a classic noir thriller, and a meditation on the nature of reality. The book feels chaotic, the author's imagination set loose without the constraints of logic, but that's an illusion. By the last page, Pynchon ties up every loose end and hands every character his or her just desserts.

Meanwhile, every page offers new delights – absurd scenes, laugh-out-loud hilarity, crisp dialogue, wildly creative plot twists, and every now and again, passages of such beauty they stopped me cold. By the time I'd finished reading, I'd turned down at least a dozen pages to mark particularly remarkable prose. Here's an example from early in the book.

Back at his place, Doc stood for a while gazing at a velvet painting from one of the Mexican families who set up their weekend pitches along the boulevards through the green flatland where people still rode horses, between Gordita and the freeway. Out of the vans and into the calm early mornings would come sofa-width Crucifixions and Last Suppers, outlaw bikers on elaborately detailed Harleys, superhero bad asses in Special Forces gear packing M16s and so forth. This picture of Doc's showed a Southern California beach that never was – palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works. He thought of it as a window to look out of when he couldn't deal with looking out of the traditional glass-type one in the other room. Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knobs of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.

Long sentences, yes – I noted more than one paragraph without a single period – but nevertheless crystal clear, at least to me. I've seen those paintings. I get it, if you know what I mean.

That was a common sensation while reading Inherent Vice. The author would offer up some description, through Doc's eyes, and I'd have an immediate sense of understanding, a sense that I'd seen this myself and that I grokked the underlying meaning.

Now I did live in southern California for several years – though much later than the time period in this novel. And I will admit that I smoked some pot back in those days. Would this book resonate as strongly for someone who'd never seen Venice Beach or Griffith Park? Someone who'd never tasted good old Mary Jane? Is Pychon a sufficiently gifted writer that he could bring Doc's environment and mental state to life in a reader who had no real world experience to use as a reference?

Of course I can't answer that question. Perhaps that hypothetical reader wouldn't be interested in the book in the first place – and would end up the poorer for it.

Here's another paragraph, one of my favorites, full of imagery that will stick with me long after I've lost the details of this extremely complicated creation.

Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned from times when back turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who – what was he working for anymore?

Funny, surprising, original, insightful – a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek social commentary, a vivid snapshot of a period lost to history, a no-holds-barred festival of the imagination – if you can handle sentences that ramble on for half a page, and you're not morally opposed to drugs, I think you'll enjoy this book.