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The exchanges are shtick, pop cultural inspired parodies of Italian life: Slagiatt references Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” in his argument, and the talk of whacking reminds the waiter of his work as an extra on The Sopranos. The episode opens with Slagiatt’s arguing with the waiter over the pronunciation of pasta e fagioli, an exchange that segues into mafia-inspired banter between Slagiatt and the restaurant owner over whacking the waiter for his refusal to accept that he is mistaken. Following their meeting, the two go to lunch. Not far into her investigation in the novel, Maxine looks up Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt (whose name is an acronym for “seemed like a good idea at the time”), an Italian-American venture capitalist and assumed Mafioso who had invested in a company, hwgaahwgh, with which hashslingrz may not have had entirely legitimate business dealings. To look for closure in such a mystery would be to expect Pynchon to have taken on the role of a soothsayer rather than a novelist. Bleeding Edge, then, is as much an inquiry into the mysteries of contemporary American life as it is into the mysteries of hashslingrz’ corporate activities. Bleeding Edge is not simply the tale of Maxine’s investigation but an examination of the cultural direction America is headed in-has been headed in for over half a century-and of the effect the Internet and the 11 September, 2001, terrorist attacks have had on the pace with which we continue in that direction or find reasons to resist doing so. The lightness, like that of Pynchon’s other short novels, is deceptive. The plot follows the now unlicensed fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow as she looks into the dealings of hashslingrz, the dotcom run by Gabriel Ice, the novel’s villain, and sustains a fairly straight storyline, despite Maxine’s straying into a number of sometimes only loosely related inquiries and its resisting, in typically Pynchonesque fashion, tidy closure. Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, the third Pynchon has published since 2006, will likely be received as one of his lighter offerings.
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