A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

NOT SO LONG AGO, my friends and I decided to spend a semester reading the thickest books we could find in the university library. I started with Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. At 750 pages, sporting a bright a spiral sun on the cover, it was everything—comic, dull, sad, paranoid, obscene, apocalyptic, tragic, incomplete. I had never heard of Pynchon then, but over the past five years, along with the indelible dark circles I have under my eyes from that semester, Pynchon stayed. When Bleeding Edge, his latest, came out last year, this time with kitschy diagonal writing on its cover, it seemed like he gave a knowing nod to those had been initiated. Bleeding Edge, set in pre-9/11 New York, in the early days of the Internet allows Pynchon to adroitly pursue that time-bending, labyrinthine, in-andout rigmarole that he is so good at. By the time one reaches the last page, the reward for surrendering expectations— gaping holes, unsolved mysteries, leads not followed and plotlines cut short (almost nothing ever gains clarity)—is more delight than annoyance. What we get instead are Fitzgeraldian vignettes of New York City, both affectionate and estranged; the naggings of Pynchon’s inner Jewish mother; a cast of half-alive, half-real characters, most important among them a wonderful and picaresque Maxine Tarnow, mother of two, who runs a private fraud investigation agency called Tail ‘Em and Nail ‘Em.

Maxine begins sniffing around a dot-com startup called hashslingerz.com, whose CEO, the archvillaineous Gabriel Ice, is or isn’t—who knows?—involved with murders, laundering millions through hawalas, funding time-travel experiments on children, and perhaps inveigled in the planes crashing into the twin towers. And in the 500 pages, club-hopping, house-breaking, ganjasmoking, Berretta-donning, neither Maxine nor the reader get close to putting the pieces together. The age-old detective story with dispersed clues, cross-city detail and a Scooby-Doo denouement is turned on its head.

Published in 2013, it may seem an anomaly that it had 9/11 at its center. Most of the works that later came to be known as post-9/11 literature reached its fag end by 2008. Gravity’s Rainbow’s first lines “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”—are oddly prescient of the twin tower attacks. Pynchon reduces that event to a few paragraphs and it turns up late in the narrative. Its aftermath, however—the War on Terror, paranoia pervading nations and individuals, the increasing government surveillance uncovered by Snowden, the schizoid, selfie culture of Facebook and Instagram, and “let’s not forget late f***** capitalism”—gain momentous weight.

Bleeding Edge, in the latter half excavates the insidious motif of Gravity’s Rainbow—an exploration, celebration, condemnation, proliferation and dramatization of paranoia. Pynchon effortlessly claims cyberspace and the 21st century as the continuation of his works—all of them concerned with the tensions between freedom and captivity, coherence and incompleteness, the remembered and the unrecognizable. I see Bleeding Edge as a historical novel. Although dealing with a subject not too distant in calendar time the world now seems light-years away from where we’ve journeyed since the first days of the Internet. Pynchon's topical references to technology and mass media and the Internet's potential for alternative social organisation and anarchic communities have for long now become an indispensable part of our cultural history. In one instance, a Reg Despard, with a camcorder, records a film in a theatre, zooming in and out for its own sake. When a NYU professor buys one of tapes he comes running back to ask “if Reg knew how far ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form he was working, ‘with your neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis’.” His research into the cyber world, Deep Web, hackers’ ethics, and high- and low-brow pop culture is incredible. Although retrospective, the novel has all the stand-ins for what were to become Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, the hacker collective Anonymous, swipe-gaming, military drones and PRISM. After a sprawling career of comic-digressive and barefacedly complicated narrative, Pynchon’s new book has the overall effect of bemused frustration, of struggling to get hold of that extra clue that will help make sense of this dangerous and overwhelming world. Bleeding Edge is a lot like real life.