Bleeding Edge

By: Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by: Jeannie Berlin

Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

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)

Great Book, Terrible Reader (1 Star is 1 too many)

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

I would recommend any Pynchon novel to anyone who is willing to put forth the time and effort that it requires!

What other book might you compare Bleeding Edge to and why?

The only book I can compare this to is Pynchon's Inherent Vice - very "User-Friendly Pynchonian"

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

I actually read along in the book with this audiobook. This is something I do with several novels that I feel could use the extra attention. Jeannie Berlin was absolutely terrible. On a base level I have to admit that I find her voice very annoying to difficult to concentrate on. Even more importantly than that I noticed while reading along that she would often mis-pronounce words, change words from those written to those that seemed to suite her cadence, and also did not read the novel in the same cadence that the actual punctuation would require. All in all I think I will now avoid any audiobook that is read by this reader. The short version: Jeannie Berlin should not make a career as a reader.

Worst narrator I have ever heard. Do not buy.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I think I like the story (a lot), but the narration is pathetic. I'm not sure I can finish the book. Do not buy it, and do not buy the Kindle book because that would be rewarding Amazon for its poor choice of a narrator. Buy the hard copy (and not from Amazon).

Who picked that Reader, Thomas?

I'm sorry I know it reflects more on me i like the book but could not stand more than a few minutes of that voice. I'm very sorry I tried but it's very irritating.

horrible vocal performance

Would you try another book from Thomas Pynchon and/or Jeannie Berlin?

This narrator ruins the great new book by Thomas Pynchon. She sounds like a cross between the late talk-radio voice Lynn Samuels and Laugh-In's Ruth Buzzi. It doesn't sound like she's even read the material beforehand. It sounds like a grating, horrible COLD READING!!! Ugh!

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

It was HORRIBLE.

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

Yes.

Any additional comments?

Thomas Pynchon is America's great writer. Give him some voice talent. The guy who read INHERENT VICE isn't much better. Who is in charge of voice talent around here???

The narrator is awful!

This is by far the worst narrator I have ever listened too. Read it do not get the audiobook.

really poor narration

What did you like best about Bleeding Edge? What did you like least?

I love audiobooks. I love Thomas Pynchon. This performance is so poor that I have dumped the audio and bought the Kindle edition. I suspect Ms. Berlin wasn't given enough time to prepare.

A Good Book. A Horrible Audiobook.

Stick with the printed version.

Although Bleeding Edge is an outstanding book, this is probably the single worst narration of any of the audiobooks to which I've listened. Given Ms. Berlin's history as an actress, one would expect a much better performance. Have you ever had that experience when you're reading aloud, think you've reached the end of a sentence then discover that it continued with another word or clause? Every sentence seemed to surprise her. Very often it felt like she didn't understand what she was reading. Why anyone thought this reading was good enough to release is beyond me.

Raspy and Hoarse, but Good

"Bleeding Edge" is my first introduction of this author and I thought that it was excellent. I really enjoyed Thomas Pynchon's style of storytelling, with the dot com bust, ponzi schemes with the shady part of the business and the loose triangle romance with the main characters. It all leads up to the day of 9/11 when the towers fell. I really liked this book.

As far as Jeannie Berlin performance of reading the "Bleeding Edge," I found her voice to be tolerable. Sure, the narration could had been a lot better by someone else, but despite the numerous warnings from other reviewers on how bad Berlin's voice is, I don't regret giving this book a chance. The content was good enough to kept me going and I had a few laugh out loud moments on how her voice was so raw that it was just funny.

She doesn't even tries to rap the hip hop tunes, how funny is that?

Her voice is not so bad, but it could had been better. It's all about the content. For example, many of us agree that Scott Brick is a good narrator. I liked"Salt Sugar Fat," and found the information to be interesting, but his performance in "The Twelve (the passage trilogy)," was horrendous because I didn't like those books.

I'm not defending the performance of Jeannie Berlin in "Bleeding Edge," but it's all about the content. If the content is good, at least I can overlook the performance of the narrator.

For those who couldn't finish the book because of Ms. Berlin's performance, Audible should give them a free download if the publisher decides to record another version with another voice. I almost passed up this title many times because of the 1 star rating for the narrator. I'm glad that I went for the content.

Plus her voice is so raspy and hoarse that I couldn't fall asleep during the story because I needed to pay attention to follow the plot

The Narration the biggest problem with this book.

Would you try another book from Thomas Pynchon and/or Jeannie Berlin?

Yes

Would you recommend Bleeding Edge to your friends? Why or why not?

Yes

Would you be willing to try another one of Jeannie Berlin’s performances?

No

Could you see Bleeding Edge being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

No comment

Any additional comments?

There have been a lot of negative reviews of Jeannie Berlin as the narrator. I'm not sure she is as dire as people are making out. Her voice is actually very interesting if it was applied to ONE character. The problem is that her voice so completely dominates the narration and she absolutely does not change the voice when she moves from one character to another, so it becomes almost impossible to tell from her voice and intonation who is speaking in the book and thats fatal because you quickly lose the whole flow of the story. I would suspect that your average listener would have no idea what this story was about because of that.

Terrible Narration

Narrator made this unlistenable. Couldn’t get past the first 15 minutes. Returning this one ASAP.