Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . .
Bleeding Edge is a novel written by Thomas Pynchon. Released in 2013, it tells of a fraud investigator looking into a CEO.
Characters[]
- Maxine Tarnow
rest to be added
Publisher's summary[]
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?
See also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Suffering Channel | David Foster Wallace | 2004 | A novella based on the 9/11 attacks |
| Falling Man | Don DeLillo | 2007 | A novel based on the 9/11 attacks |
| The Reluctant Fundamentalist | Mohsin Hamid | 2007 | A novel based on the 9/11 attacks |
| The Best of Times | Haynes Johnson | 2001 | A nonfiction book on a similar time period |
| Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close | Jonathan Safran Foer | 2005 | A novel based on the 9/11 attacks |
| Cyberia | Douglas Rushkoff | 1993 | A nonfiction book on the early internet |
| Pattern Recognition | William Gibson | 2003 | Another novel set around 9/11 |
| Surveillance Valley | Yasha Levine | 2018 | A nonfiction book on the early internet |
| Which Way Did He Run? | David Grann | 2002 | An essay on the 9/11 attacks |
| Absolute Friends | John le Carré | 2003 | A novel with similar themes |
| Spook Country | William Gibson | 2007 | A novel with similar themes |
| The Shallows | Nicholas Carr | 2010 | A nonfiction book with somewhat similar themes |
| The Cuckoo's Egg | Clifford Stoll | 1989 | A nonfiction book detailing a somewhat similar mystery |
| Samaritan | Richard Price | 2003 | A novel with somewhat similar themes |
Sources[]
- Goodreads
- Wikipedia
| Works of Thomas Pynchon | ||
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Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) | ||