Thomas Pynchon's new novel prompts a question relevant to him and to all contemporary artists, from writers to directors to choreographers: If the present day is atomized, paranoid, infantile, obsessive, can a work of art capture this without taking on these attributes itself?
BLEEDING EDGE, by Thomas Pynchon. Penguin, 2013, 496 pp., $28.95 (hardcover)
"Bleeding Edge" is a multicharacter detective(-ish) story, set in 2001 in a New York thrumming with ventures linked to Silicon Alley, the home of Manhattan's tech companies. Its concerns are momentous: 9/11 — which takes place just over halfway through — the Internet, and the price of capitalism.