“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.