![]() Pynchon understands that in the future there will be no secrets, no hidden complots - everything will be aired and any second life, whether in the cloud or in the firmament, will be despoiled or denied us. For Pynchon - the embattled bard of the counterculture, disabused of all allegiance - the last redoubt has become the family, and the last war to be waged is between our virtual identities and the bonds of blood a war to keep the Virtual from corrupting the Blood, if not forever, then for time enough to let the lil’ Ziggy and Otis Tarnow-Loefflers of this world live with the merest pretense of freedom (childhood). ![]() " Bleeding Edge, however, offers an indication that Pynchon has finally given up on seeking the soul of the nation his family helped found. Illustration: Simon Pemberton An exellent Harper's Magazine article that combines a review of Bleeding Edge with detailed biographical and genealogical info on Mr. His broken plots expose the epistemological brokenness of paranoid systems, which are, after all, nothing but attempts, grander but no less doomed to failure than anyone’s, to make sense of a broken world." Full article » forward, nearly all his novels have been founded on a bedrock of detective fiction and underlayed with science fiction, boy’s adventure, westerns, spy fiction, and other genres that rely, like conspiracy theories, on plotting. Criticism of Pynchon’s “shaggy dog” or sloppy plotting neglects the emphasis that he has always laid on the dual meaning of the word plot. Incompleteness is the inherent vice of paranoid theories of history, the limitation of such theories that Pynchon has always freely acknowledged. "One ought to be accustomed, by now, to Pynchon’s leaving his mysteries unresolved, or at least prepared to give him credit for having done so on purpose. Chabon's a long-time appreciator of Pynchon and his perspective on the work is unsurpassed, and his 11/07/13 review for The New York Review of Books is illuminating. Photo: The East Bay Monthly Wow! Writer Michael Chabon delivers a wonderful, insightful review of Bleeding Edge.
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