Another Negative BE Review

[David Morris]

These parts of this review are just how I've been feeling about BE.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/bonfire-of-the-inanities/

At one point early on in Thomas Pynchon’s new novel*Bleeding Edge*, two
little girls buy binoculars and spend hours spying on an ornate old Upper
West Side apartment building with “helical fire escapes at each corner,
turrets, balconies, gargoyles, scales and serpentine and fanged creatures
in cast iron over the entrances and coiled around the windows.” The girls
sometimes stay up until the early morning, “staring over at the lighted
windows across the way, waiting for something to happen.”[...]

And the experience of reading [BE] is perfectly parallel to the experience
of watching shadows pass by the windows of a big, complicated-looking
building, sitting cramped and eager for page after page, waiting for
something to happen. It takes a hundred pages or two for you to clearly
identify what that ‘something’ is: you’re waiting for Thomas Pynchon’s
magic to show up.

It never does. What shows up instead, on page after interminable page, is
yet more tired riffing. Only where such riffing in *Inherent Vice*, with
its neon California-noir setting, was merely irritating, in *Bleeding
Edge* it’s
deeply offensive, because the book’s setting is our own immediate past and
centers on the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001 – a national trauma
about which only crackpots and lunatics have the bad grace to riff. [...]

Instead of such divine intervention, the first half of *Bleeding Edge* is
full of *shtick*. Almost every character is a jokester ready with several
grade-A zingers (you’ll never meet busboys and bike messengers this funny
in real life). [...]
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