Another Negative BE Review

[jochen stremmel]

>(you’ll never meet busboys and bike messengers this funny in real life)<

That point of criticism reminds me of the opposite one, held out by
some professionals  against Scott Smith's A Simple Plan: that there
was no single character in the book you wanted to sit next to at a
bar.



2013/11/3 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
> 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 novelBleeding 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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