Bleeding Edge - A Rolling Assessment

[Fiona Shnapple]

I'm not sure how BE is a decline from IV. Readers here, and in several
reviews,  seem to be faulting the author for not writing a novel that they
can get at from the inside. BE is brilliant in its humor and in how it
captures, as only Pynchon can, a period and place, saturated with cinemas.
The project begins with VL, as film gives way to TV, moves on to the Net
with IV and bombs out the mind with BE. Who can write these dialogues? Were
a part of BE put on stage, the theater would have a Shakespearean audience,
young and old and middle of the pack. Kings and Children.  I can't wait for
the film and I hope P sticks around and pitches in on it.

The parody is Shakesepearean. The magic of puns is lowlanded in your lap, a
kick in the crotch.

 If you want cannonical, Nobel Literature, read his great novels; this one
is for the preterit, those passed over by the nobels.

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>wrote:

> 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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