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)

Worst Narrator Ever

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Re-record with a new narrator and I think the book would be great.

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

Never, no way!!!!

Any additional comments?

I am astonished that this made it out of production, this is akin to an April fools joke. I cannot believe this narrator was hired, the most awful I have heard in well over 300 books.

Plotz! plotz! Kvetsh! Try giving it a chance, nu?

I admit that I had much the same negative reaction when I started Bleeding Edge. But over time, Ms. Berlin's reading has come to charm me. Not only does she embody the sound and style of New York Jewish protagonist to a T, but in a way her bumpy reading reflects the uncertainty and disorder of her character as she stumbles from one clue to another on the journey Pynchon has laid before her. I now find Ms. Berlin's reading to be refreshing. I can see why Pynchon blessed the reading, and I find myself agreeing with him.

Shalom.

The Bleeding Ear

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

It's not the book, it's the horrid narration. It took me several attempts just to get past the first chapter.

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

The metal-on-metal screeching of a train derailing.

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

Jar Jar Binks would have been an improvement.

Any additional comments?

Pynchon is a fine author. His prose is special. This narrator manages to hold a pillow over the face of Pynchon's humor and smother it to death.

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.

This narrator has destroyed a good book.

What would have made Bleeding Edge better?

Shoot the narrator

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

Anybody. Her nasal monotone ruins the book. A listener cannot tell whether the main character is speaking, whether the narrator is speaking, whether someone is musing aloud.

What character would you cut from Bleeding Edge?

The narrator

Any additional comments?

I want my money back. This is a good book that becomes incomprehensible because the narrator has no inflection, no emotion, no passion and only one voice. A listener cannot know who is speaking.

Nostalgia for the Guliani days

Definitely the Y2K version of Inherent Vice, chockablock with a feeling of time and space. Another great short Pynchon. I held off on this so long because of the narrator (even returned it once). It’s like they got the confused HR lady at Penguin to read it. Hardly any characterization (she has two male voices: generic and Russian; two female voices: herself and herself speaking Valley girl), very weird lilt and cadence, mispronunciations on bigger words. Only listen if you can pay attention to who’s who.

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.