It was the web that educated me about contemporary literature, not through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there, but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what Pynchon—and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—were working toward in fiction: a plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections), and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I read about Modernism—big “M”—and postmodernism—small “p”—thanks to links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made by and intended for a limited but discerning audience; postmodernism, by contrast, had popular or populist aspirations—it wanted to be famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom LeClair to describe the complicative methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph McElroy—and Pynchon.

Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology, at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same schematics

“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).

Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.