Her assistant solves one of their cases by taking her reading glasses off while looking at a spreadsheet “and suddenly, blurry but there it was, the pattern”. Maxine’s job makes her an ideal heroine, “part of the Certified Fraud Examiner skill set being a tendency to look for hidden patterns”. With Pynchon, the mysteries tend to stay mysterious. Maxine’s investigation forms the basis of what passes for the main plot of the novel, though Pynchon’s plots are less like the kind you find in a police procedural, more like the kind imagined by paranoid conspiracy theorists more about webs of connections, seeing patterns in the chaos, than going from A to B to C until the mystery’s solved. She doesn’t have to dig very deep to turn up dirt: fake accounts hefty sums being siphoned off to a slush fund in Dubai a mysterious facility hidden beneath Ice’s house at the far end of Long Island, next to Montauk Air Force Station, long the focus of conspiracy theories about secret government experiments into UFOs and time travel. Maxine is hearing mentions of hashslingrz and Gabriel Ice, its chief executive, all over the place, and before long she’s being hired to look into suspected irregularities at the company by a venture capitalist who invested in one of those it took over. But there’s one tech company, hashslingrz, that has not only survived the crash but appears to be thriving on it, hoovering up smaller businesses just as they’re about to go bust. It’s a year since the dotcom bubble burst, and Maxine’s professional world is seething with refugees from Silicon Alley. It begins on “the first day of spring 2001” on the Upper West Side, where Maxine Tarnow, a divorced mother of two and freelance fraud investigator, is walking her sons to school on her way to work. Its narrative takes place in Manhattan, over the course of a year. Then there are the zippier novels, no less brilliant but more narrowly focused in geography and timescale set, if not in the here and now, then in the somewhere nearby and within the author’s adult lifetime: The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Vineland (1990), Inherent Vice (2009) and now the dazzling Bleeding Edge. There are the vast, sprawling, panoramic, elaborate, years-to-research-and-write, mind-blowing historical behemoths with casts of thousands – Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006). ![]() There's no uninnocent dead.Since his first novel, V, came out in 1963, when he was 26, Thomas Pynchon has written two kinds of book. You know what? All the dead are innocent. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. ![]() Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the anetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. ![]() Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time." No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. “Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window.that was the moment, Maxi. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.” As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them-we who called down the sacred lightning of 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. "But there's still always the other thing. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian 'war' and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. ![]() But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. We see those official close-ups on the screen. “Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it.
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