So how’s this for a story: A relatively low-level US military employee discovers that the government has secretly been collecting data on its own citizens and using it to predict the next enemy attack. This realization prompts him to defect, joining a loosely-knit counterforce and launching a tragicomic transcontinental chase where he is pursued by vengeful American authorities across the globe. Edward Snowden, right? Sure, but also a major plotline in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.
Cast your eyes back across the decades and it is amazing how prescient Pynchon’s writing has been. As a Cornell undergraduate, he co-wrote a dystopian play that predicted the era of mobile computing. 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49 invokes the Trystero System, a WELL-like alternative communications network. Way back in 1984, Pynchon wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review that foretold the rise of big data, the whip-cracking impact of the Long Tail, and the fragmenting of popular culture, all within the first two paragraphs. Pynchon is perhaps the only living writer who draws equal inspiration from Norbert Wiener and Rainer Marie Rilke, who has written both Boeing technical manuals and indie-rock liner notes; it’s hard to imagine a novelist better suited for the Internet Age.
But over the last couple of decades, Pynchon's work has felt oddly out of step with the times he predicted. His last two major book — Mason & Dixon and *Against the Day *— are historical novels, linked to the present condition only by loose analogy. His shorter books, Vineland and *Inherent Vice, *are Lebowski-esque larks, meandering tales that treat urgency as a sin to be avoided at all costs. Pynchon’s famous aversion to photographs and publicity once felt like a radical act of resistance, but no longer carries the same punch amidst our Warholian swirl of selfies and status updates.
That all changed in 2013, when two events firmly confirmed Pynchon’s relevance. The first was the aforementioned Snowden affair, which plunged the nation and the tech industry into the overheated confusion of Pynchon’s classic questers. We know we are being watched, but we aren’t sure by whom, how much information they have, or how they are using it. Is the NSA merely engaged in routine police surveillance? Have devilish usurpers turned what was once a revolutionary platform for free expression — like Lot 49’s Trystero System — into a system of surreptitious control? Or, as Bruce Sterling chillingly argues, was that the point all along? This is the Pynchonian mind state, always on the edge of confirming our most paranoid instincts, but without the comfort of knowing for sure.
The second event is this month’s publication of Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s ninth book and his first to take on the Internet as a major subject. Bleeding Edge is set in Silicon Alley in 2001, after the dot-com collapse and through the events of September 11 (referred to here as “11 September”). In structure, it’s another shaggy-dog detective story, in the style of Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice. Private investigator Maxine Tarnow starts sniffing around a web company whose wunderprick CEO has been snapping up cheap fiber and whose partner is mysteriously murdered. Meanwhile, she’s getting back together with her ex-husband while carrying on dalliances with a government assassin and a foot fetishist, and a videographer-friend of hers has weird footage of what appears to be some kind of 9/11 precursor, and there’s some guy with an insanely accurate sense of smell.
The plot is picaresque and fun, but not particularly essential and occasionally exhausting. But then again, as Publishers Weekly aptly puts it, “reading Pynchon for plot is like reading Austen for sex,” and where *Bleeding Edge *really shines is in its evocation of the age and its sense of collapse. Take this description of a Y2K-themed party on the night of September 10, in which an insta-nostalgic celebration of an avoided disaster plays as unknowing prologue to a fast-approaching one: “The theme of the gathering, officially ‘1999,’ has a darker subtext of Denial. It soon becomes clear that everybody’s pretending for tonight that they’re still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year’s dreaded Y2K, now safely history, but according to this consensual delusion not quite upon them yet, with all here remaining freeze-framed back at the Cinderella moment of midnight of the millennium when in the next nanosecond the world’s computers will fail to increment the year correctly and bring down the Apocalypse.”
Less seriously, it is a real thrill to watch the culturally omnivorous Pynchon dissect everything from Jay-Z/Nas beefing to Jennifer Aniston’s verbal tics to Metal Gear Solid to kozmo.com bike messengers. And then there are the puns. Even the terrible ones are endearing, and the good ones kind of delightful. (My favorite: the Scooby Doo episode in which the gang takes on a Colombian drug lord ends with the line “And I would’ve got away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for these Medellin kids!”)
The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions — between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos — through which he has framed the last half-century. It’s hard not to see Anonymous in one character’s desire for “good hackers around interested in fighting back” against the Web companies “screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys.” Hard not to see everything from SecondLife to BitCoin in “DeepArcher,” a virtual world in which avatars conduct encrypted transactions far from government’s reach. Hard not to see AT&T and Verizon in one character’s prediction that the Internet, once connected to cell phones, would become “a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”
For all his famed paranoia, Pynchon never fully casts his lot with the conspiracy theorists, although it’s clear they have his sympathies — even the 9/11 truther that pops up in these pages. As usual, Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.
