Here's the deal: you don't read Thomas Pynchon for his plots. It's all a mess and you're never going to actually find out what's going on. You just have to accept it.1
Finally, at a phone number obtained off a toilet wall at a bar in Mile End, she located one Felix Boingueaux, who'd been working out of a basement apartment, what they call a garconniere, off of Saint-Denis, for whom Vip's name didn't just ring a bell but threatened to kick the door in, since there were apparently some late-payment issues. They arranged to meet at an Internet-enabled laundromat called NetNet, soon to be a legend on the Plateau. Felix looked almost old enough to drive.
She is Maxine. And she's the star of the show. A no nonsense Jewish lady from New York who's tougher than an over-boiled bagel.
Maxine runs a small fraud-investigating agency down the street, called Tail 'Em and Nail 'Em--she once briefly considered adding "and Jail 'Em," but grasped soon enough how wishful, if not delusional, this would be--in an old bank building, entered by way of a lobby whose ceiling is so high that back before smoking was outlawed sometimes you couldn't even see it.
You might think it's about Maxine sifting through pages of account books and double checking things with her calculator. Maybe some excel spreadsheet action. Not so. There's a lot of breathless charging across town on questionably important errands.
It's really about Maxine's many different relationships: ex-husband, kids, CIA agents, crusty activists, hackers, rich wives, cabbies, crafty convenience store owners. And how the dot-com bubble felt. And the days before and after 9/11. And some secretive tech mogul who's funneling money to terrorists? And also a 3D graphical representation of the internet, like the metaverse, but really it's just a search engine. And a lot of just being in New York. And food.
Each sentence is loaded, like he wrote a paragraph and cut away at it until all that was left was this sentence and it's not got a single whiff of filler left in it. But also, it might be missing some of the regular parts you're used to.
"So," shrugging away any scold signifiers in face and voice, "a mom-approved first-person shooter."
In Bleeding Edge, as all Pynchon, things get zany, serious too, but goofy, and you find yourself reading along happy to believe in scent detectives with odor-guns ("The Naser") and retired Russian mobsters who have turned into tech VCs with a deep appreciation for ice cream.2 There's no trouble being there. He's got a gift for sucking you in so that when you finally come back up for air, you're wondering whether you've been reading for five minutes or fifty. But it can be tiring and sometimes you end up never finishing.
"Envy," supposes Heidi, "is so often all that stands between some of us and a sad, empty life."
Footnotes
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It's been a while since I posted one of these reviews because this darn book got me lost and maybe I lost interest and it took me a while to finish--which I will admit has happened before with Pynchon. ↩
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"Fucking Nestle," Igor rooting through the freezer. "Fucking unsaturated vegetable oils. Hippie shit. Corrupting entire generation. I have arrangements, fly this in once a month on refrigerator plane to Kennedy. OK, so we got Ice-Fili here, Ramzai, also Inmarko, from Novosibirsk, very awesome *morozhenoye, Metelitsa, Talosto...today, for you, on special, hazelnut, chocolate chips, vishnya, which is sour cherry..." ↩