Re: Review: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)

[John Bailey]

I've only just scanned this 'review' but it looks like a must-read for
P-listers.

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:23 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Now THAT'S what I call a review!
>
> It offers, among many other things, food for thought in a current debate:
>
> "It takes sex to knock Maxine out of her cynical gumshoe pose. Where the
> typical PI would fall for the femme fatale prior to realizing her
> deviousness, Maxine falls prey to masculine wiles in spite of knowing
> exactly what she’s dealing with. For two hundred pages, Maxine skillfully
> interrogates corporate flunkies, foot fetishists, and olfactory precogs, and
> then abruptly throws herself into the arms of the far more malevolent
> überspook and “federal penis” Nicholas Windust. Creepy, overbearing, and
> charmless, with a long track record of state-sponsored torture and murder,
> Windust has only to mumble a few words breathily, and Maxine, or more
> precisely Maxine’s libido, falls hard for him.
>
> This is not a new story for Mr. Pynchon. Here is a sampling of how often he
> has used it:
>
> Pynchon Graph 1
>
> The woman-jerk motif is just one prominent case of how Mr. Pynchon uses
> recurrent patterns rather than linear plotting to structure his novels.
> Regularities emerge /not/ on the micro-level, where plot developments often
> seem random and pointless, but on the statistical macro-scale level. For any
> individual woman, the motivation provided never seems sufficient—sometimes
> no explanation is given—but it keeps happening, like a law of nature. In
> /Vineland/, Frenesi and her mother Sasha Traverse speculate that their
> attraction to uniformed men is an “ancestral curse…as if some Cosmic Fascist
> had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and
> initiation into the dark joys of social control.” Mr. Pynchon later gave
> further credence to this theory by having their great-aunt Lake Traverse
> enact a very similar betrayal in /Against the Day/. Many of these women
> repent; some, like Katje, even try to undo the damage. But Maxine’s
> self-awareness puts her far beyond anyone else in the above table. Maxine is
> puzzled at her own compulsion, and feels a mixture of self-disgust and
> helplessness. She is not so puritanical as to loathe her own libido, but
> neither is it within her conscious control: “she must have been wet without
> knowing it.” Unlike Frenesi in /Vineland/, she is not so dumb as to believe
> she can redeem Windust, and so she does not endanger her family and betray
> her principles as Frenesi does. We are a far ways from Frenesi’s shrug, “You
> know what happens when my pussy’s runnin’ the show.”
>
> Maxine finds she can’t resist, but her exasperating compulsion spurs a will
> to understand and forgive—not only Windust, but Horst. Her understanding
> cuts the federal penis down to size. Attempts to control are, after all, the
> cruel and ultimately futile efforts of scared little boys; the information
> age gives Maxine the wisdom to understand this. It does not, however, give
> her the power to change it. As so often in game theory, additional knowledge
> can be a handicap to action, not an aid. Even as March drowns in conspiracy
> theories only to gain conspiracy freak followers, Maxine keeps a keenly
> skeptical eye on everything and sorts through the information, only to find
> that it is impossible to master and does not cohere."
>
> So Maxine belongs but then again belongs not in the row?
>
> On 09.10.2013 00:03, Dave Monroe wrote:
>>
>> http://theamericanreader.com/review-thomas-pynchons-bleeding-edge/
>> -
>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l