Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

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. 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. There may not be quite as much money around as ...

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

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. 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. 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.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. 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. 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 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. Foul play, of course.

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.

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. Who wants to know?

托马斯•品钦（Thomas Pynchon）

当代文学巨擘，被哈罗德•布鲁姆称作美国当代最重要的四位作家之一，屡次入列诺贝尔文学奖候选名单。

品钦对个人生活讳莫如深，成名后深居简出，早年的照片和档案也离奇消失，引发了媒体、学界和书迷对其生活的狂热考证。作品包含着丰富的意旨、风格和主题，通过迷宫式的叙事和对自然科学、前沿科技、高等数学、现代物理等领域的概念借用，描绘了美国光怪陆离的社会全景，道出了现代社会中人类的艰难处境，展现了鬼才品钦诡谲的视角，以及对黑色幽默、犯罪悬疑、侦探等元素的娴熟运用。

其代表作《万有引力之虹》被评论家称为借助神力完成的大百科全书式作品，曾获美国全国图书奖，但拒绝领奖。亦著有《拍卖第四十九批》《V》《葡萄园》等重要作品。

蒋怡

毕业于南京大学外国语学院英语系，获文学博士学位，现任教于江南大学外国语学院英语系，译有《最接近生活的...

托马斯•品钦（Thomas Pynchon）

当代文学巨擘，被哈罗德•布鲁姆称作美国当代最重要的四位作家之一，屡次入列诺贝尔文学奖候选名单。

品钦对个人生活讳莫如深，成名后深居简出，早年的照片和档案也离奇消失，引发了媒体、学界和书迷对其生活的狂热考证。作品包含着丰富的意旨、风格和主题，通过迷宫式的叙事和对自然科学、前沿科技、高等数学、现代物理等领域的概念借用，描绘了美国光怪陆离的社会全景，道出了现代社会中人类的艰难处境，展现了鬼才品钦诡谲的视角，以及对黑色幽默、犯罪悬疑、侦探等元素的娴熟运用。

其代表作《万有引力之虹》被评论家称为借助神力完成的大百科全书式作品，曾获美国全国图书奖，但拒绝领奖。亦著有《拍卖第四十九批》《V》《葡萄园》等重要作品。

蒋怡

毕业于南京大学外国语学院英语系，获文学博士学位，现任教于江南大学外国语学院英语系，译有《最接近生活的事物》《格伦•古尔德谈话录》等。