1. The release date will be 9/17/2013. The third week in September.
2. You're not going to get some 800 page behemoth. According to Amazon, Pynchon's new book clocks in at 496 pages. While not his shortest novel, it's certainly not his longest either which I'm not sure if it's a good thing or bad?
3. According to Amazon the book is a thriller, suspense, mystery book which I have to say really intrigues me now. After I write this post I might pre-order the book on Amazon.
4. Once again from Amazon here's the plot synopsis that I'm sure will be on the books dust jacket:
"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 DeepWeb 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?"
I love the last line. Reminds me of the movie 'Starship Troopers' when they show those news programs on the bug war and they end each segment with "Want to know more?"
As for this hypnosis? It sounds like a mix of Pynchon elements mixed with a Elmore Leonard heroine. I actually can't wait to see how a blogger is portrayed in Pynchon's world. Just the fact that bloggers are mentioned has sealed the fate that I will buy this book.
As whether this book will be good or not? That's what we'll have to find out. Lot of synopsis make books sound like they're the greatest thing ever (which is the point of plot synopsis on the dust jackets and backs of books) but once you actually start reading you can be surprised. I hope Pynchon surprises me with this book. As I said back in February, I found Pynchon's last two books 'Against the Day' and 'Inherent Vice' to be disappointments. I hope 'Bleeding Edge' is more 'Mason & Dixon' than 'Against the Day'.
Oh God I have to have this book just for Pynchon's take on bloggers. They'll either be scoundrels or the greatest people ever.
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