wherein thomas pynchon writes a jewish noir about the internet. for some i can imagine the writing will come off as too puny, a bit too smart, too woody allen. i for one loved how it read. are people really as sharp tongued as the stories heroine? i don’t know, but she was fun to hang out with.
the story takes place after the dot com burst and before 9/11 and mostly deals with the fallout of the digital sector after it soared so high in the nineties. maxine, a kind of financial detective, has to dive down into the deep web and in regular pynchon fashion meets a whole slew of characters while unraveling several interlocking mysteries. at some point aliens may or may not be involved.
there was a bit of embarrassment at reading pynchon describe the deep web like some kind of spirtualized second life, complete with fully rendered avatars and 3d spaces but i guess talking about lines of code is never interesting. hackers is a ridiculous movie and terrible representation of actual hacking but i still like it because it has fun with it. similarly i’m not that put out by the anthropomorphized web here.
what you might call lesser pynchon but still pretty enjoyable. for what its worth i think one of, if not my favorite book is pynchon’s mason & dixon so if you’re interested in what i consider greater pynchon then thats probably a good place to start.
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