New Pynchon Novel!

[chrisvia]

Who's looking forward to the new Thomas Pynchon novel, set to release in September?

http://www.amazon.com/Bleeding-Edge-...dp/1594204233/

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?

[ashulman]

I can't wait. I almost don't want to know this far in advance. I try not to dwell on the anticipation.

[chrisvia]

I can't wait. I almost don't want to know this far in advance. I try not to dwell on the anticipation.

I share the same sentiment. Just tell me when it's out!

[Abanera]

Ooooo! I can't wait!

Every new Pynchon novel is cause for celebration. He may no longer be doing meta-fiction like Gravity's Rainbow, but his more recent work is far more accessible. I loved Inherent Vice.

I always wonder, though, how he could possibly make a living. I can't imagine that all of his books have sold so many copies to leave him awash in royalty wealth. He doesn't publish articles very often. Supposedly he lives very modestly somewhere in New York, but I'll bet his payments for voiceover work on The Simpsons paid more than the royalties he's received in recent years.

[ashulman]

His early novels sold pretty well I think, and they are constantly in print, so he probably does ok.

[Muchograndeeeaa]

I'm more interested in paul thomas anderson's adaptation of "Inherent Vice"