APF

Pynchon’s case encompassed a more distinctive kind of comic vision that combined low-brow,
farcical humor and existential dread. In Bleeding Edge the danger seems muted because it
doesn’t fully extend to Maxine herself, who is too intrepid to succumb to terminal angst. The
humor is still here, but it is more diffuse and sporadic, manifested in wiseacre dialogue and the
narrator’s sarcastic asides (usually reflecting Maxine’s sarcastic attitude) rather than through
such extended set pieces as, for example, the “Byron the Bulb” episode in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Bleeding Edge is in general a much more dialogue-dependent novel than Gravity’s
Rainbow or V. Indeed, much of the novel’s “action” is related not through its direct depiction but
by reports conveyed through the dialogue, to the point that this can seem less a novel concerning
the events to which it mostly alludes (including the 9/11 attacks) than talk about these events.
Some of the talk is mordant and witty in the usual Pynchon fashion, but much of it is surprisingly
routine, an impression left only more insistently by the novel’s formal arrangement as essentially
a series of scenes organized around verbal exchanges between the characters. Those of us who
admire the stylistic audacity and rhetorical power of Pynchon’s prose in previous novels get very
little of either in Bleeding Edge.
Bleeding Edge is a book worth reading simply because it’s by Thomas Pynchon, although
anyone contemplating it as an introduction to Pynchon’s work should instead go immediately to
V or Gravity’s Rainbow or even The Crying of Lot 49, which, although now apparently
somewhat disdained by Pynchon, has long served as a more accessibly condensed example of
Pynchon’s literary strategies and worldview. Ultimately, however, Bleeding Edge is not so much
“minor” Pynchon as it is a kind of synthetic replica of a Thomas Pynchon novel, all the more
disappointing because it was written by Pynchon himself.
Don De Lillo
Among the writers commonly labeled postmodern, the two most immediately mentioned
are usually Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Since the term was first coined to describe a turn
away from the reemergent realism of the post-WWII years, it has been defined and redefined to
the point that it has lost any coherent meaning. That it now so reflexively brings to mind the
work of these two writers is a telling indication that it has come predominantly to refer to
recurrent themes, a “worldview” more than formal innovation. To write postmodern fiction is to
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