Paranoid Interference on Maxine's Antennas (Kurt Mondaugen revisited)

[Fiona Shnapple]

She is so easily conned.

When she is set in the positive parody of the tradition of the
hardboiled fiction genre , a fiction that has its roots in romance,
she seems cool, that is, tainted enough, cynical enough.

Moreover, what she has lived through (dot com etc.) and where and when
(NYC under Rudy) provides a traditional hardboiled setting of
corruption, mob politics, banksters and the rest. Her business is
located in a building that is described as temple of finance built at
the end of the roaring 20s, just before the Great Crash and
Depression. And this connects her to prior periods of corruption and
crash (a sad cycle of market madness, real estate speculation, well
documented in American Romance and in the inheritors of what James
Wood call's Melville's Estate-- the taking of Matthew Maule's land to
build, with the labor of Maule's children, Judge Pyncheon's House of
Seven Gables). The little quip on the business name--the tails and
nails but never jails is not merely a comment on the crooks of our
current financial repression, but this little joke and others remind
us that the novel is not simply a September 11 novel, or even a dotcom
novel, but a novel about greater themes in America and also, about the
state of our souls right now.

In any even, Maxine seems a positive parody of the traditional (so I
love her so much more than that idiot in IV)  but her judgements are
confused by emotions, insecurities and paranoia that set her on and
often over the borderline.

Of course, in the tradition, her bender on the boat with the
borderline crew is perfect, but then there is Reg. What can make of
this dude? He, after all, brings this "job" to our heroine. With his
camera, with his delicate flip of fingers, he gets Maxine in on this.
Did I say he mentions the gun? He does. He flips her buttons with
compliments she soooo desperately needs. Sure, she's out on a
harboiled bender, needs to be vulnerable. But Reg ain't exactly a
Femme Fatale, or a James Bond Babe. Once he gets a handshake on the
deal, he says he feels like Erin Brockvich. How does that work? ANd
speaking of work, Maxine is helping reg out here for free. The job, he
says, is to find out who he's working for. Well, he knows who he's
working for.  Why does Maxine take the job? In working for Reg, who
works for Ice, she's working for Ice. For free. Can you say
Crowdsourced?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l