In his review of Bleeding Edge, Jason Tanz dubs Thomas Pynchon a “prophet of the post-Snowden era”:
The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions—between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos—through which he has framed the last half-century. It’s hard not to see Anonymous in one character’s desire for “good hackers around interested in fighting back” against the Web companies “screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys.” Hard not to see everything from SecondLife to BitCoin in “DeepArcher,” a virtual world in which avatars conduct encrypted transactions far from government’s reach. Hard not to see AT&T and Verizon in one character’s prediction that the Internet, once connected to cell phones, would become “a total Web of surveillance, inescapable.”
For all his famed paranoia, Pynchon never fully casts his lot with the conspiracy theorists, although it’s clear they have his sympathies — even the 9/11 truther that pops up in these pages. I guess this could be considered a spoiler, but no regular Pynchon reader will be surprised that Maxine’s mystery never gets fully defined, much less resolved. As usual, Pynchon doesn’t provide answers but teases us with the hint of closure, leaving us ultimately unsure whether the signals add up to a master plot or merely a series of sinister and unfortunate events. The overall effect is one of amused frustration, of dying to find that one extra piece of information that will help make sense of this overwhelming and vaguely threatening world. It feels a lot like life.
The Dish 