Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[Fiona Shnapple]

>
> There were at least two reviews in the NY Times. Put the two I
> read together and you have a fair assessment of the book.
>

Or should I say, a fair assessment of the reviews of the book, of the
readers, and how they read late Pynchon?


> Lethem is the better of the two, not because he likes the book (as I do,
> love it, in fact), but because he gets it. Kakutani simply doesn't get
> Pynchon. She can't because she won't.   And whille the books are getting
> easier to get, getting them for some isn't worth the effort, not even for
> big fams of early Pynchon. The New York City setting, the 9-11 part, these
> may influence some, but it is the "zapping" and "surfing" of characters,
> the mediated lives, the channels and platforms, the screens, the Persistent
> Worlds, the versimular videoed New York, that saturates and stains, even
> the Bloody Day itself, when the brave men and women rushed in, dove from
> the top floors,  with its discourse, its ideologies, it models copied and
> scanned and marketed that will send the book flying across the Hudson to a
> landfill in NJ.
>

So be it.

Let it Bleed.

Let it Be.

Which do you want it to be?
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