Bleeding Edge

Good in parts, but I expected much more. Not one of Pynchon's best

I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but I'm also not sure it matters. Pynchon handled 9/11 very deftly. I was worried. I shouldn't have been. Effortless dialogue, memorable characters. He did a good job with the early 2000s tech jargon and feel in general.

Pynchon is obviously smart, sometimes very funny and capable of producing the most unnecessarily complex plot possible. None of which make up for how he constantly shoves his political ideology in your face, how he he introduces a new minor character every 3 pages, giving you yet another inconsequential name to deal with or how all of his characters feel flat and passionless, driven by a bored curiosity more than any sense of justice or meaning. All of which are huge distractions and make the Bleeding Edge unnecessarily tedious, hard to follow, hard to want to try.

And for a novel about technology, Pynchon's descriptions of technology and the Internet were sometimes right on, but more often than not, and in some very fundamental ways, showed a lack of understanding of what he was talking about. Stuff like looking for the right pixel on a web page to click to take them to the right part of the ‘dark web'. Sigh.

So yeah, there are some interesting moments, funny songs, and amazing sentences, and if I really wanted to weave together all the connections between characters and the intricacies of the plot, I'd probably find some beautiful spiderweb with a big old conspiratorial black widow or evil capitalist or something right in the middle but meh. I'll leave that to someone else. I'm (once again) done with Pynchon.