Bleeding Edge

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Are you ready for Thomas (Screaming Comes Across the Sky) Pynchon on the subject of Sept. 11, 2001? On the one hand, his poetry of paranoia and his grasp of history’s surrealist passages make a perfect fit. Yet his slippery insouciance, his relentless japery, risk being tonally at odds with the subject. Either way, and despite his sensibility’s entrenchment in ’60s Californian hippiedom, Pynchon is a New Yorker, with an intimate license to depict the sulfurous gray plumes and tragic tableaus of that irreconcilable moment: “On the way home she passes the neighborhood firehouse. They’re in working on one of the trucks. . . . She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard. . . . What makes these guys choose to go in, work 24-hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?” Thomas Pynchon, meet Pete Hamill? Not so fast. For it is the audacity or recklessness of “Bleeding Edge,” Pynchon’s new novel, also to sound like this: “Maxine notices this one party out on a remote curve of the bar, drinking you’d say relentlessly what will prove to be Jägermeister and 151, through a Day-Glo straw out of a 20-ounce convenience-store cup. . . . Sure enough it’s him, Eric Jeffrey Outfield, übergeek, looking, except for the bare upper lip and a newly acquired soul patch, just like his ID photo. He is wearing cargo pants in a camo print whose color scheme is intended for some combat zone very remote, if not off-planet, and a T-shirt announcing, in Helvetica, REAL GEEKS USE COMMAND PROMPTS , accessorized with a Batbelt clanking like a charm bracelet with remotes for TV, stereo and air conditioner, plus laser pointer, pager, bottle opener, wire stripper, voltmeter, magnifier, all so tiny that one legitimately wonders how functional they can be.” In fact, the awful day is delayed for more than 300 pages, by which time the two airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into an exemplary Pynchon shaggy-dog novel in full effect. This one, featuring earth notes of Bret Easton Ellis and William Gibson, concerns the diversion of funds, by the shambolic white-collar outlaw Lester Traipse, from a hot Internet start-up called hashslingrz to a fiber brokerage called Darklinear Solutions, under the knowing eye of the corrupt dot-com entrepreneur Gabriel Ice. These figures move among dozens, in a conspiracy typically dazzling and ludicrous, as well as impossible (and maybe unimportant) to confidently trace. We join a good companion in failing to trace it: Maxine Tarnow, fraud investigator and mother of two, who among Pynchon’s protagonists is rivaled for tangibility and homely charm only by the doper private eye Doc Sportello, from 2009’s “Inherent Vice.” Though this book’s about as long as “V.,” categorists will mark it as Comparatively Stable, with “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Vineland,” as opposed to the Utterly Centrifugal: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Against the Day.” Maxine pinballs between workplace and family, and among the men in her life: her ex-husband, the commodities trader Horst Loeffler; her infuriating fake-Zen shrink, Shawn; and the neoliberal death-squad spook Nicholas Windust, Pynchon’s latest update of his prototypical cop-heavy. Like Philip Marlowe, Maxine plunges into dive bars armed with nothing but her wits — except Marlowe never stripped for a pole dance to surveil customers from the vantage of the stage. She also visits DeepArcher, a re