There is high magic in low puns

[Carvill John]

You're right, that review is interesting. The passage you quote from....
"It is probably fair at this advanced stage to note that Pynchon has an incurable obsession with language: its capacity for behaving like glass or gauze. The opening paragraph of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) – “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” – makes a point of stating where eloquence can’t go, either because we don’t hear V-2 rockets any more, or we no longer hear anything that resembles them, or because the only people who might have heard them were dead by the time they got the chance (being supersonic, the V-2 announces its arrival after it has already landed). But then “screaming” is already a comparison, a clarifying anthropomorphic metaphor. Fastforward more than half a century – from 1944 to 2001 – and there are even more phenomena to describe or half describe, more slang to borrow from espionage and economics, erotica and psychiatry. One of the things that Pynchon wants to expose is the way we massage things into metaphor and then forget that we’ve done it."
...is thought-provoking. But I struggle to connect what he's saying about Pynchon with what Pynchon has actually written in BE (or at least in its first 100 pages, which is where I'm up to). Robson is spot on with the love of language angle, but BE makes me feel as though Pynchon's ardor has cooled. 
Then there's this:
"The book’s title, though a term in its own right (meaning new technology with risks attached), is repurposed here as a pun on a metaphor – the word “pun” being, as Gottlob Frege points out in Pynchon’s novel-beforelast Against the Day (2006), “und” upside down and back to front and a good way of bringing things together. Bleeding edge isn’t just a melding of a favoured phrase with the vaguest of themes. A bleeding edge is also an edge that has lost its sharpness, and one of Pynchon’s main subjects has always been identity’s lack of firmness, the habit things have of ceasing to be themselves – in this case, things such as the internet and New York."
Again, good stuff. But again - say what? Calling a tech-centric novel 'Bleeding Edge' is like calling a fictionalised life of Freud 'Penile Cigars'. 
Maybe all will be clear once I've finished the book. For now, theories such as Robson's seem like wishful thinking. And whether Pynchon's thematic interests - and constructs - are really 'there' or not, the actual writing is sub-par. It isn't enough to throw out phrases which can come to seem freighted with multiple meanings and heightened contextual significance: we need to be entertained, and wowed by the elegant and unexpected use of language.


From: montedavis at verizon.net
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: There is high magic in low puns
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 06:16:11 -0400

“It is probably fair at this advanced stage to note that Pynchon has an incurable obsession with language: its capacity for behaving like glass or gauze…. One of the things that Pynchon wants to expose is the way we massage things into metaphor and then forget that we’ve done it.” You go, Leo Robson. One of the best reviews I’ve seen. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/09/bleeding-edge-thomas-pynchon-dotcom-survivors 		 	   		  
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