Bleeding Edge

By: Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by: Jeannie Berlin

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the Internet. It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there's no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what's left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. 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, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the Internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we've journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

©2013 Thomas Pynchon (P)2013 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013

"Brilliantly written...a joy to read.... Full of verbal sass and pizzazz, as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best." (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)

"A precious freak of a novel, glinting rich and strange, like a black pearl from an oyster unfathomable by any other diver into our eternal souls. If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed...a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for, ever since it went to bed early on innocent Sept. 10 with a copy of The Corrections and stayed up well past midnight reading Franzen into the wee hours of his novel’s publication day." (Slate.com)

Jarring Narration

How did the narrator detract from the book?

From the first few sentences I was surprised at how amateurish the narration was. She is reading; not narrating. Her voice is grating. She misreads words (Silicone Valley vice Silicon Valley). I love Thomas Pynchon but it is going to be a long slog getting through 15 hours of Jeannie Berlin.

Really poor narration

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

This is a wonderful book, but the narration is terrible. I have a high tolerance for different voices but I couldn't listen to this narration. It is so flat and the inflections are so poor the humor of the story is lost.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Jeannie Berlin?

Roslyn Landor is my favorite narrator although I'm not sure she would be right for this. Pynchon requires an ironic voice like the narrator who read Inherent Vice

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Yes

Any additional comments?

Offer a new version of the narration and try and get the rest of Pynchon available on audiobook.

Ruined by narration

This is a challenging book to read, and I'm sure it's a nightmare to narrate. The narrator seems like she's giving it her best shot, but has awkward pauses that make it hard to follow the already difficult sentences. Near 6:31 there's a perfect example of this, she's got a sentence about characters going to a diner and digging in. There's an awkward pause before "dig in" and it's clear she didn't quite understand the sentence the first time around.

Characters don't have sufficiently distinct voices and the dialogue, which has characters interrupting each other and not finishing sentences requires a lot of focus to follow.

I've listened to a few books of similar difficulty where the narration actually helped make the book easier to follow.I have no idea if I'll make it through this one.

Narrator ruins this book

What didn’t you like about Jeannie Berlin’s performance?

I can tell the book is well written and funny, but out of the many, many audio books my wife and I have listened to we both agree the narrator is the worst we have heard -- almost unlistenable. Her voice is grating and very unpleasant. But even worse than that, she reads in a monotone, completely missing the normal cadences of speech and of the writing. It makes the sentences difficult to understand and makes most of the funny passages fall flat. I would certainly recommend reading this book and passing on this version.

Someone is playing a joke

I have listened to hundreds of books over the years and this is by far the worst reader I've heard.

Holy narrator batman

I found this impossible to listen to. I genuinely do not understand how multiple people thought this was ok to publish with the narration as it is. An incredible story absolutely ravaged of emotion and depth by the most grating monotone I've heard since grade school.

maxine is molly jong-fast

A previous review said that the performance was unlistenable bc of the reader's accent. I thought the accent was perfect, and here's why: The novel uses a third-person limited POV where our understanding of the characters and events are filtered through the protagonist Maxine. Maxine is complex: the daughter of aging left-wing New York Jewish intellctuals from the Upper-West Side, the somewhat clueless but caring mother of two digi-native teens, and a cynical yet conspiracy-curious gumshoe who has seen it all. So, what should this character sound like? She should sound like Molly Jong-Fast, and she does.

A fine wine in a dirty and cracked glass

Is there anything you would change about this book?

Ever since V in 1963 Thomas Pynchon has written superb novels and Bleeding Edge does not disappoint in anyway. He spins a dazzling web of a plot populated with engaging characters and conveying a powerful message for our times. An excellent read

How could the performance have been better?

Its hard to imagine a worse selection of narrator than this. She was presented with excellent material to perform but delivers it in a croaking monotone with no discernible sensitivity for timing or inflection rendering a fine novel almost unbearable. Its hard to understand how this performance escaped the studio. This narration made me buy my first hard copy novel for years.

Listen to the sample before buying!

Full disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Pynchon fanboy. That being said, if you're considering Bleeding Edge, check out the sample. If you can handle the narration, and you're familiar with the author, you will love Bleeding Edge. It's got everything Pynchon fans like, but in a more subdued, dare I say "mature" way?

It's about the Internet. It's about 9/11. It's about what it means to be real and alive. It's full of conspiracy and obscure hacker (Yes, Thomas, I remember anon.penet.fi and own an earlier edition of ORA's Perl 5) and pop culture references from the noughties. However, I didn't find the references stifling and forced (unlike the 80's references in Ready Player One. Then again, I did admit I'm a bit biased).

Like any good fanboy, I picked up the audiobook and printed book on the publication date. I love the book but just can't get into the audiobook. Granted, reading Pynchon is a daunting task. Any reader would have trouble really nailing puns in Russian or hitting every German joke, but Jeannie really made it sound -exceptionally- difficult.

I really wouldn't bother with the audiobook, but the book's so good I encourage curious shoppers to check out the sample. Maybe it's just me!

If you've never read Pynchon before, I emphatically suggest skipping this audiobook as an introduction. There's too much in the writing to love to be turned off by the reader!

Read this book, don't even attempt to listen to it

MAYBE, if you are a techie hacker from NYC, you'll like. Reader does not change inflection or tone for characters, so one cannot discern who is saying what. I wish I'd looked at the ratings before I purchased, because I've tried but doubt I'll get all the way through it. Ms. Berlin has a strong Bronx (?) accent, which is fine, but she is no actor. The plot rolls through scene after scene of conversations in which you, as the listener, struggle to understand what is being said, and by whom. Such a disappointment.