'I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers' is a gag designed to give the more bitter reader (who, again, needn't understand the line's real meaning) the thrill of cultural mastery – a sense of what it would be like to be so clever you can diss Tennessee Williams's sincerity at will.

Talk about nessun dorma,' is a typical invocation: it requires no understanding of the allusion, but invites the reader to bask in a sense of shared refinement. 'All night long, not a shadow in the neighbourhood. Like a major bank, like a marriage, Bleeding Edge is an idea too big to fail – at least, not without grand-scale disillusionment.Īs if this had burdened Pynchon with the task of keeping the investors sweet, he supplies regular perks external to the story, mainly in the form of intellectual flattery. Add to this thematic weight the fact that Pynchon invokes the tones of multiple genres – detective story, chick lit, teen lit, sci-fi, Tom Wolfean social satire – and the fact that it takes almost 500 pages, most of them frantic with pop-culture references, to unfold, and a sense emerges of the scale of investment Pynchon demands from his reader. Its concerns are momentous: 9/11 – which takes place just over halfway through – the internet, and the price of capitalism.

It prompts a question relevant to him and to all contemporary artists, from writers to directors to choreographers: if the present day is atomised, paranoid, infantile, obsessive, can a work of art capture this without taking on these attributes itself?īleeding Edge is a multi-character detective(-ish) story, set in 2001 in a New York thrumming with ventures linked to Silicon Alley, the home of Manhattan's tech companies. W hen March Kelleher, the leftwing, paranoid blogger in Bleeding Edge, invites the heroine, Maxine Tarnow, to recall 'what Susan Sontag always sez', Maxine responds: 'I like the streak, I'm keeping it?' But March – the novel's voice of misguided sincerity – persists, correcting her: 'If there's a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need 'a deep sympathy modified by contempt'.' Sontag's idea strikes at the heart of what Thomas Pynchon has undertaken in Bleeding Edge.

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