Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[Carvill John]

Thanks for that enjoyable personal history, Robin. And I reckon we're all with you on the lamenting bookshop culture front.

> It arrives yesterday. I'm about 60 pages in. This seems affectless,  
> like it was written on autopilot. 
Reads like it was written by a Pynchon-imitating robot. Maybe that's the point, given the tech theme?

>There's jokes, but I'm not laughing. 
Yehp.
  
> I did what I did to defend I.V. in the group read. 
I never understood the downers on IV. Yes, it was a relatively minor work, but wonderfully enjoyable and still full of striking passages, from page one onward. In IV, the snappy dialog was on the right side of that line where cute crosses over into annoying; in BE, that rubicon has been left way behind. In IV, the dialog was supported by beautiful Pynchon prose - jazzy and poetic; in BE, that prose has degraded by several orders of magnitude. In IV, I was forever reaching for a pencil, either to make a note or just to run a line down the side of the page, marking a particularly good passage; with BE, my pencil has not been called for once so far.
I've had a busy week, so I'm still stuck around page 100 or so. I'm in tow minds whether to carry on, or go back and start again, hoping to 'get' it second time round.... It's Pynchon, so I'm open to the suggestion that the fault lies with the reader, i.e. me. But if my current impression doesn't radically change, this is destined to be the first Pynchon novel I unequivocally categorise as a stinker. Yikes.






 		 	   		  
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