“The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”
“Awesome.”
“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.”
Goodreads rating: 3,60 ✰
Amazon rating: 4 ✰
Chiara’s rating: 2,8 ✰
Plot: Maxine Tarnow runs a fine little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side. All is ticking over nice and normal, until she starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, and an array of bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
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It is unnerving when a man writes a woman without knowing much about women. Many examples can be found throughout different genres of literature, such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, in which he describes a woman by affirming “her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her entire weight, which was just over 100 pounds”, or Mathias Malzieu’s La Mécanique Du Coeur, which recites “her breasts look like two little meringues so wonderfully well-cooked that it would be inconvenient not to devour them right away”, which would not be that bad if the speaker was not a ten-year-old boy. In Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, the reader luckily does not encounter such obscenities; nonetheless, Maxine is presented as a woman who cannot exist, maybe because Pynchon does not know how to write women, or maybe on purpose. She is a mother, she solves crimes, she is very present in the lives of her parents and her children, and still manages to look attractive to all the men surrounding her while doing all of that. It is unrealistic for a woman to be able to solve crimes full-time, putting her life and her children’s lives at risk, and still have the time to live her sexual life to the fullest.
One surely can appreciate Pynchon’s attempts to create a feminist environment and give life to a female character who is not seen as a sexual object all the time, but Bleeding Edge cannot be considered a feminist reading. Maxine is not a character comparable to Chris or the women described in Wallace’s horror stories, but oftentimes, enough is as good as a feast, also when dealing with sensitive topics such as feminism. It is also rather funny how the cover of the book does not present any stereotypical feminine elements, such as a sensible colour palette or a nice, curled font for the title, and still the content will be seen from the point of view of a woman.
Moreover, Pynchon has been criticised for his past works and the limited presence of female characters who have the option to join a family environment, instead of being written into one with the obligation to act as a mother, where motherhood is holy, and every possible other possibility being denied. The story surrounding Maxine’s life events is very interesting and has a lot of potential, but it would have been much more enjoyable if Pynchon had paid a bit more attention to shaping the main character into a realistic role model for women to look up to, therefore giving her flaws and showing that sometimes it is okay to fail as a mother, instead of presenting a perfect alternative which cannot and will not ever exist in the world of today. Still, one can appreciate the attempt: better luck next novel!
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