Review: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

The X-Files believed in the truth. (source: x-files.wikia.com)

Paranoia is a trendy mental state. Paranoid delusions have been recorded throughout history, but the form that they take is a remarkable mirror to contemporaneous society. Feelings of persecution and conspiracy were, in the sixteenth century, likely to be blamed on demonic possession or witchcraft; in the twenty-first, they are more likely to be seen as some kind of government conspiracy, or to feature plot-lines lifted from The Truman Show or The Matrix. Reality dissolves into a complex, almost convincing facsimile; unending webs of clues offer continual and provocative hints that something is awry.

If the forms of paranoid delusions are based on the cultural tropes surrounding the sufferer, then it logically follows that by examining the delusions one could seek to understand the larger culture. Such a process has, for much of his career, been the goal of Thomas Pynchon. His works tend to follow confused, isolated figures who traverse landscapes fecund with hyper-signifying clues; often the realities of his worlds will fragment, for a moment – glitches in the Matrix, pauses where things don't quite make sense. Shadowy enemies pursue manic protagonists, maybe. The uncertain ontological state of Pynchon's world – is it reality or simulation, everyday 1999 or computer generated prison? - infects the fiction itself on a sort of meta level. We never know if the conspiracies actually exist; we never know if Pynchon's stories contain a shred of realism. “For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle unto some paranoia.” This is the situation for Oedipa Maas, the hero of The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), and, in Pynchon's eyes, it may well be the situation of the average American too.

Pynchon views American culture as fundamentally paranoid. This dates back to the hard-line Calvinism of the first Pilgrims (conspiracies have deep roots). Puritan theology views the world as another revelation, a coded message from God to man. Observation of natural phenomena can therefore offer access to deeper truths. The poet Edward Taylor, for example, observes a spider:

                                 Hell's Spider gets

                                 His intrails Spun to whip Cords thus

                                 And wove to nets

                                 and sets.

                                 To tangle Adams race

                                 In's stratagems

                                 To their destructions ('Upon a Spider Catching a Fly', 1680-2)

Or, more briefly: a spider catching a fly is like Satan tempting humanity into sin. Or, briefer still: the world is out to get you. Puritanism's fairly harsh stance on predetermination – that everyone, pretty much, will be damned, and even if you're not, you can't know it – and the doctrine of Original Sin – everyone carries the burden of an earlier fall from God's grace – foster a fairly negative attitude. Everything in the world is a symbol of man's fall and imminent damnation.

To gloss quickly over three-hundred or so years of history, not much has changed. National traumas (JFK's assassination, Pearl Harbour) spawn fairly mainstream conspiracy theories; there are theories about a bunch of really innocuous seeming stuff like the Federal Reserve and water fluoridation. Conspiracy theories have even gained mainstream political recognition: see the embarrassing débâcle about Barack Obama's birth certificate. The '90s saw the enormous popularity of The X-Files, a show where basically every known conspiracy was realised on screen, and where UFO-loving crackpot Agent Fox Mulder is proved correct at every turn, in small towns like yours all across America. Death in the woods? 'It's probably aliens,' speculates Mulder, and it is. Death in an office building? 'It's probably a rogue Central Operating System,' guesses Mulder, and he's right again. The show, however, is careful to prevent Mulder from ever finding the definitive proof he needs to go public. Instead, it 'proves' it to the viewer, by showing on-screen the paranormal elements, and then having hazy pseudo-bureaucrats cover it up. The genius of the show was in weaving the variably-crazy paranormal/UFO/evil computer/ghost/monster delusions into the larger tapestry of governmental conspiracy. After all, the idea that your own government might be against you is surely scarier and more plausible than the fear of rogue Neanderthals.

This is what life was like in the '90s: carefree fun, not even worrying about all the calories in those 'shakes. (source: bilmoore.com)

It is against this backdrop that Bleeding Edge, Pynchon's most recent novel, opens. Maxine Tornow, mother-of-two and fraud investigator, beings to poke around some dodgy start ups in New York. The year is 2001; the first dotcom bubble has just burst, and hasn't yet reinflated. Mark Zuckerburg is just about to start at Harvard, and will later go on to inspire a movie staring Jesse Eisenberg. Seinfeld has been off the air for three years, although Friends is still going strong. Predictably – inevitably, fatedly – Maxine starts to uncover hints of a large scale X-Files-style governmental conspiracy. There are dodgy payments and time-travelling assassins, glimpses of the full vast bureaucracy of the military-industrial complex in full swing. The whole thing is enjoyable, Pynchonian, fairly light-hearted, swathed in '90s nostalgia and exquisite references (name me one other major work of literature that features jokes about Pokémon).

And then, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, on the 9^th of September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 and American Airlines Flight 175 are hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre. Bleeding Edge is so grounded in 2001, and 9/11 so seared onto our collective memory, that there's no way you don't see it coming. And yet, you never expect 9/11 to happen during the novel's narrative. Like the conspiracies of V. or The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow, you didn't expect payoff, just paranoia.

This is the genius of Pynchon's new book then: that the paranoia finally gets made real. The shocking thing is that no one really expects it to happen; part of being paranoid, after all, relies on the conspiracy remaining shadowy, hidden, obscure. The moment Pynchon stages in Bleeding Edge feels like a recapitulation of classic Puritan lapsarian theology, made relevant for the computer age. Before 9/11 – before 'The Fall' – the novel is vibrant and exuberant, the conspiracies threatening, sure, but more interesting and quirky than terrifying. The internet is an anarchic playground, the tech sector filled with ideologues and hackers, open-sourcers who promote knowledge and experimentation. New York is still a city: Giuliani hasn't yet managed to gentrify and yuppify and sanitise the whole of Manhattan.

But all of these innocences are being eroded. Urban gentrification, the corporatisation and monetisation of the internet, the establishment of cyber-spying and intelligence gathering: all act to attack the Edenic idyll of 'Silicon Alley' – or, more broadly, of the '90s culture where The X-Files existed, where conspiracies were about alien cover ups and monsters who ate livers. The erosion had already started, but 9/11 is the singularity that marks the transition, the gunshot the marks the death-knell of an already terminal patient.

Soon after the attack, paranoia starts up again. There are whisperings about Jewish involvement, pan-Islamic involvement, military involvement. There are inconclusive evidences that the government staged, or knew about, or something, the attacks. Pynchon doesn't side with the 9/11 conspiracists, and refuses to validate any of the various theories in the novel. In a sense, 9/11 is, for New York, beyond conspiracy; the comfort provided intellectually or emotionally by the coherent, certain knowledge of the conspiracy world view is scant comfort if your home is under attack.

But in a more figurative sense, paranoia is the right response to the post-9/11 world. There is an episode of The Simpsons, also from the late '90s, where Bart is proscribed a drug called Focusyn. A side effect of this drug is that Bart becomes increasingly paranoid, and eventually convinced that he is being spied on by Major League Baseball. Obvious he seems crazy; when he steals a tank, he seems crazier. Then Bart shoots down the actually MLB spying satellite, and it turns out his paranoia was true. In 1999, the concept is pretty funny, and faintly absurd. In 2013, the idea of being spied on to this degree by corporations is commonplace; furthermore, the government are doing it too. It's the path from this absurd late '90s paranoia to its actualisation ten years later that Pynchon follows in Bleeding Edge; he tells a Fall narrative where humanity falls not because it gains more knowledge, but because it becomes more ignorant, more in the dark.

Some Thoughts on Zadie Smith

I've been reading quite a lot of Zadie Smith recently. I read her latest novel, NW. I read some short fiction that appeared in the New Yorker: one some kind of techno-dystopia, that, to be honest, was pretty bad; the other about an illegal immigrant in North London that was ok but not great. I read an interview she did with London's Evening Standard where she came across really well and it turned out she likes Game of Thrones. I read some of her essays and journalism: an interview with Jay Z (note: his name is now unhyphenated) and an essay on joy, both of which were excellent. I'm still not convinced that, as a fiction writer, she's one of the greats, although she definitely has a lot of talent. But there is something about her and her writing that I find very compelling, and I've been trying to assess what exactly it is.

1) She writes about Britain. I feel small and parochial saying this, but I think that, for me, her writing about stuff in Britain is actually appealing. There's a pleasurable squirm of recognition and familiarity from scenes set in places you know, or places that are really like places you know (just like I felt watching the London bits of Fast and Furious 6). There's an ease of access, culturally, a sensitivity to class and race barriers that I'm already pretty familiar with. So there's that. Also, I find it refreshing to be reading novelists who aren't writing brazenly and blandly about America. Don't get me wrong, I love America, I'm possibly the most Americaphilic person I know who isn't actually American. But a stream of modern (hyper-)realist novels about America can get tedious. It isn't the geography, it's the genre. They want to be the next Great American Novel, and, I think that genre's pretty desiccated nowadays like Owens Lake, sucked dry from years over overuse. (A brief aside on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, that I'm currently nearing the end of a struggle through: this is a book so tediously in this Great American Novel tradition that, despite being only ten years old, it feels like it's seventy, to the point where all the references to contemporary technologies like cell phones or laptops or the internet feel weirdly anachronistic. It's a bit like my dad telling me that he owned a smart phone in the '70s. I wouldn't believe him, and I still wouldn't trust him to use it properly.) There's something fresh about Smith's attempts to produce modern, British novels.

A picture of the Great American Novel.

2) Zadie Smith is genuinely beautiful. As far as I can tell, never having met her. Again, I feel pretty bad saying this, because it seems like a fairly sexist remark, and potentially not something that I'd say about a male author, or should want to say about an author of any sex. But writers tend to be so relentless depressing looking, saggy and unfashionable and bespectacled, or nerdy and neurotic, or pasty from years of library-light. Her beauty gives Smith an edge; it makes her seem glamorous and cool in a way very few authors actually can. And it lets her do it effortlessly, without having to try hard to shock or brag like a failed punk band. Her coolness is important, because it elevates her cultural status beyond that of a literary author. ‘My sister tells me I’m in the Evening Standard every other week. My fame seems not to require my presence,’ she said to the Standard. It's sad that we live in a society where being beautiful makes you seem cooler, especially because, in so many other ways, Zadie Smith seems to be quite cool anyway. But it is an advantage she has that propels her out of the narrow literary-fiction niche into a more culturally relevant area, that she perhaps shares more with artists like Vampire Weekend or Kanye West (although, Smith is nowhere near Kanye West, who may be the best current pop-cultural expression of consumer capitalism both within his songs and sort of mimetically in his public life) rather than ugly old Will Self or similar.

Oh, Kanye, you devil. (From breitbart.com)

3) Zadie Smith is cool. I know this is essentially the previous point, but it should be stressed that Zadie Smith seems actually cool. By which I mean, beyond the fact that she's likeable seeming and beautiful, that she is aware of current pop culture in a way that few other authors seem to be. She likes hip-hop and Game of Thrones; she references Friends and The Wire (in NW) in a been-there sort of a way. She's aware of the need to be pop-culturally sensitive, rather than literarily exclusive (I know this isn't a very fair binary, but, whatever). She says of Game of Thrones: 'Literary novelists would do well to learn to plot from these people.’ And she's totally right. If only more writers could plot. (Although, also, Game of Thrones, and George R.R. Martin in particular, could learn a lot from literary novelists, especially with regards to economy and actually finishing stories rather than rambling aimlessly for thousands of pages in a constant peripatetic digression that will only end with the death of the author and the disappointment of the fans. But this is a rant for another article.) Even more astute than this awareness is her awareness that she is, in fact, a little bit out of touch. That she is one generation behind of today's young people stuff. She writes 'Meanwhile, back in the rank and file, you still hear the old cry go up: Hip-hop is dead! Which really means that our version of it (the one we knew in our youth) has passed. But nothing could be duller than a ’90s hip-hop bore.' I think that middle sentence, that parenthesis, contains so much wisdom.

How Game of Thrones became zeitgeisty, I will never know.
Just to be clear, Joffrey is my favourite character. (from tgdaily.com)

4) Zadie Smith writes about women. As I was reading NW, my mum remarked to me 'I'm surprised you're reading that Zadie Smith.' 'Why?' I asked. 'Isn't she one of those women's writers?' In a way (not the one my mum intended), she was right. Smith does write about women, far better than most people I have read. But she isn't a 'women's writer' in the way my mum used the phrase, a soppy Mills & Boonish romance-spewer. Nor is she a women's writer in that her novelistic purpose seems to be exclusively to rectify patriarchal literature's lack of women, lack of address of women's issues, and mannish dominance. She's just a novelist who writes about women as part of what she writes about, because, obviously, women form a large and fascinating part of the social world about which people write. As soon as you start thinking about it, it's remarkable how many otherwise great authors fail at this simple hurdle.

Here's a picture of Zadie Smith I found on someone's Flickr (from: flickr.com/)

5) Zadie Smith is a post-David Foster Wallace author without all that Harold-Bloomian anxiety-of-influence bullshit. By which I mean that she has read DFW and liked it and internalised it (all my editions of DFW have a great quote from her on the front: 'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian...He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him.') but isn't in his thrall. To again compare her favourably to Jonathan Franzen (poor guy), she manages not to crib a bunch of Wallace's preferred poetics (especially medical, psychological, pharmaceutical jargon) or regurgitate his subjects. It's clear that she has other masters (most obviously E.M. Forster). She also seems, interestingly, to have avoided Wallace's PR problems. Indeed, this whole piece is essentially about how, in stark contrast to DFW, she seems really likeable and comfortably part of the world, rather than existing best as a series of spectacular verbal constructions. (Here are a bunch of videos featuring Smith and Wallace [and Franzen!] speaking together at some event. I like the one where Wallace talks about watching the 2006 World Cup.) Which I guess is sort of why she's sort of compelling to me.

Wallace, Franzen, Smith, others hanging out in Italy. (from leconversazioni.it)

Review: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

(via mrbsemporium.com)

I love America.

I think John Jeremiah Sullivan does too.

While I, like most people, know very little about love, I am fairly sure it isn't simple. That it's made up of thousands of varieties and eccentricities and a load of stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense.

It is this kind of love that Sullivan applies to his country in this collection of journalistic essays. He writes about: reality TV, animal attacks, Michael Jackson, the Tea Party, Indian cave painting, 19^th century naturalists, Christian rock festivals, Axl Rose, One Tree Hill, Hurricane Katrina, the Blues, Disney Land, Bunny Wailer (of Bob Marley & the Wailers fame), comas, cranky old men.

His articles' style varies quite a bit too. At his best, his very very best, as good as it gets for anyone writing this sort of thing, he functions a bit like Louis Theroux. Usually he is a little more meditative, a little more investigative, a little more autobiographical.