blogging Bleeding

I was the first customer at my neighborhood independent bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown, Tuesday morning, and got Bleeding Edge.
I figure who else but Pynchon could competently show how Pynchonian the beginning of the millennium really was? I want to compare notes.

Slow start with the Pynchon, but I'm the sort of fan who is happy to hear his voice. There are some good extended jokes about the culture of psychiatry.  There is also a "karmically-challenged apartment house" on the Upper West Side. I am also the sort of fan who enjoys his style enough to keep reading pages of incomprehensible text. Some people can't stand him whether he is being incomprehensible or not. Sometimes he is very silly.  This novel doesn't start off being incomprehensible. It starts as a sort of sit com detective story whose heroine is a struggling single mother. She is a fraud investigator who is raising two boys while suffering through a separation from her husband Horst, and her wacky friend Heidi persuades her to take a cruise in the Caribean, but she soon learns that, instead of a Love Boat, she has been booked into "AMBOPEDIA Frolix '98," a convention of persons diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as "borpers." 

Here is a selection of Pynchon:

"At the first seating for dinner that evening, she found a crowd in the mood to party, gathered beneath a banner reading WELCOME BORDERLINES! The captain appeared nervous and kept finding excuses to spend time under the tablecloth of his table. About every minute and a half, a deejay cued up the semiofficial AMBODIA anthem, Madonna's "Borderline" (1984), with everybody joining in on the part that goes "O-ver the bor-derlinnne!!!" with a peculiar emphasis on the final n sound. Some sort of tradition, Maxine imagined."