![]() Half the kids seem to be on new Razor scooters, so to the list of things to keep alert for add ambush by rolling aluminum. Kids, parents, and nannies wheeled and afoot are heading in all different directions for schools in the neighborhood. Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies. Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change. Unsheltered people sleep in doorways, scavengers with huge plastic sacks full of empty beer and soda cans head for the markets to cash them in, work crews wait in front of buildings for the super to show up. Steel shutters are being rolled up, early trucks are double-parking, guys are out with hoses cleaning off their piece of sidewalk. Two-part buses, new on the routes, creep the crosstown blocks like giant insects. Sunlight reflected from east-facing apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of buildings across the street. At the corner, by reflex, she drifts into a pick so as to stay between them and any driver whose idea of sport is to come around the corner and run you over. The boys keep going, Maxine regards the tree half a minute more before catching up. As Maxine watches, sunlight finds its way past rooflines and water tanks to the end of the block and into one particular tree, which all at once is filled with light. ![]() This morning, all up and down the streets, what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side has popped overnight into clusters of white pear blossoms. Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks, it’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so? It’s the first day of spring 2001, and Maxine Tarnow, though some still have her in their system as Loeffler, is walking her boys to school. Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight.” (Jonathan Lethem) Wired magazine “The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions - between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos - through which he has framed the last half-century." It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.” (Michael Dirda) "If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed… a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for." The New York Times Book Review Exemplary… dazzling and ludicrous. Who wants to know? The Washington Post “Brilliantly written… a joy to read… Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Otherwise, just your average working mom-two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood-till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics-carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts-without having too much guilt about any of it. ![]() Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. ![]() A New York Times besteller! It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th.
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