Post-American Blues

When last we heard from Thomas Pynchon, it was the Year of Our Lord 2013. Charismatic neoliberal Barack Obama had recently defeated generic plutocrat Mitt Romney to win a second term. Whistleblower Edward Snowden was typing under a bedsheet in a hotel room in Hong Kong, having leaked information about the NSA’s surveillance programmes to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. Real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump told a British interviewer that if he were to run for president his campaign slogan would be ‘Make America Great Again’; the interviewer scoffed that it would never catch on. Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, set in New York between the popping of the tech bubble and the global war on terror, was published in September, when the most interesting conspiracy theories going were that the President wasn’t born in the United States, 9/11 was an inside job, and that the government was doing research on psyops and time travel at the Montauk Air Force Station in Long Island. Simpler times.