BLEEDING Edge — Thomas Pynchon’s “9/11” novel — is set in New York after the dotcom crash and ends a few months following the attack on the twin towers. However, the novel is more about the psychological and social human landscape of that time than terrorism.

The novel opens on a May morning with Maxine Tarnow walking her two kids to school. Even though she knows that she doesn’t need to accompany them any more she is not yet ready to completely let go of them. Surprisingly, this boringly mellow mom turns out to be a defrocked fraud investigator running her own private investigation agency called Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em. But she thinks of herself as “just a working mom.”

As with any other novel by Pynchon, Bleeding Edge is teeming with eccentric characters that you cannot easily forget. And the fact that there is a sanely numbered variety of them makes the novel fairly accessible to the general reader. Moreover, the narrative structure is linear and easy to navigate.

One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Reg Despard — “a documentary guy who began as a movie pirate back in the nineties” and used to tape movies in the cinema but always felt tempted to include clips of audiences and their reactions to the movie in his pirated copies. One day he happened to sell his cassette to a film professor at NYU, who told him he was “far ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form” with “neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis.” Now that he is a renowned documentary maker, Despard is working on a project for a firm called hashlingrz that he suspects of being involved in some shady business. He approaches Maxine to investigate this firm owned by Gabriel Ice, “one of the boy billionaires who walked away in one piece” after the dotcom crash.

When Despard asks her whether she finds him too paranoid she says: “paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.” However, once she starts investigating the firm she grasps that it is more complicated than she expected: “She hates it when paranoia like Reg’s gets real-world.” Soon enough she realises hashlingrz was making big monetary transactions to ghost contractors, makes the acquaintance of Russian mafia with designer ice creams, and finds herself in a life-threatening situation — providing the reader one wild ride of a reading experience.

March Kelleher is another memorable character who also happens to be Gabriel Ice’s mother-in-law. She is a left-wing blog writer with an extreme paranoia of late capitalism, “a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”

Maxine also has a “sort of ex” or “sort of quasi ex” husband Horst Loeffler who is “a fourth-generation product of the US Midwest, emotional as a grain elevator, fatally alluring as a Harley knucklehead, indispensable (God help her) as an authentic Maid-Rite when hunger sets in.” She regularly sees an emotherapist named Shawn “who happens to share with Horst an appreciation of silence as one of the world’s unpriceable commodities.” At one of her sessions there she meets Conkling Speedwell, “a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy.” There is also a character who can foresmell things that are going to happen.

Late capitalism, 9/11 and cyberspace are the three main concerns of Bleeding Edge. Deep Web, a battleground between hackers and corporations for the ownership of data, appears more like a disembodied consciousness in the novel. Eric, a hacker with a foot fetish who helps Maxine in her investigation of hashlingrz, tells her that although Deep Web is supposed to be “mostly obsolete sites and broken links, an endless junkyard,” it is a cover for “a whole invisible maze of constraints, engineered in, lets you go some places, keeps you out of others. This hidden code of behaviour you have to learn and obey. A dump, with structure.”

Chivalric romance turned hip goofiness, Bleeding Edge is replete with slang (“rilly” for really, “sez” for says, for instance), pop-culture references (Jennifer Aniston’s hair, Beenie Babies, Dragonball Z, to name a few), slapstick humour, exaggerated coincidences (Maxine just happens to be at the right place at the right time throughout the narrative), in addition to numerous conspiracy theories. However, paranoia — one of the key thematic obsessions of Pynchon — takes an uncanny turn when virtual reality meets terrorism.

Because the events discussed in this book are still fresh in the readers’ memories and do not require any deep historical and cultural framework, Pynchon’s description of the indelible impact of 9/11 on the peoples’ psyche takes only a few pages yet manages to stay with you long after you have finished the book: “even when you can’t see the Trade Center towers, you feel them, felt them, like somebody in an elevator shouldering up against you.”

Bleeding Edge

(NOVEL)

By Thomas Pynchon

Penguin Books, US

ISBN 978-1594204234

477pp.