Getting Constructively Lost: A Review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

Early in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, protagonist Maxine Turnow enters into an internet space called DeepArcher.  It’s not exactly a web site, not exactly a video game, but it acts similarly to both.  It is, essentially, a safe space for coders to hide or share information.  Under the guise of avatars, users are able to wander through a variety of digital worlds and communicate with other avatars in attendance.  The pixelated landscape comes into focus slowly for Maxine.  She “recognizes from a thousand train and bus stations and airports… the smoothly cross-dawning image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in advance of anything she’s seen.”  She intuits that the program is pushing her toward boarding a shuttle, but she hesitates, enjoying the complexity and effluvia of the station around her.  “‘It’s all right,’ dialogue boxes assure her, ‘it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.’”  Maxine drifts deeper into the experience, “after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.”