Dead phone lines, bounced email, experts on ancestral fur traders. How do you verify facts when the only thing known about an author is that nothing is ever quite what it seems?

A few weeks ago, around 3am, I wrote an email to someone known as "the Great Quail", who I thought might be able to help, being the administrator of a comprehensiveThomas Pynchon website. I'd been assigned to fact-check a magazine review of Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge, out tomorrow. This was an otherwise normal job, except that it required me to confirm facts about literature's most notorious "recluse" – a writer who has never given an interview, and around whom facts, fiction and conspiracy mix freely. After only a few days, my life briefly became a Pynchon novel, on a quest to discover Thomas Pynchon himself.

Granted, fact-checking is often strange work. Magazines hire fact-checkers to make sure every sentence can be called accurate, and checkers clean up stray mistakes, keep the writer honest and ward off legal trouble. Even simple tasks can be far more complicated than they first appear. How many Italians live in New York's Little Italy neighborhood, for instance? You can go to the US Census, and they'll ask you which districts you consider its boundaries. Solving that, you'll have to consider the margin of error, and decide between native Italians v "ethnic" Italians v plain old Americans of Italian-descent.

The harder the questions, the trickier the answers. How much does it cost to fly drones over the Mexican border? You have to learn whether they cross into Mexican airspace, decide whether pilot salary counts as "operating costs", and confirm everything with Border Patrol. Another: how many tons of cocaine do Britons consume annually? Which demographics were surveyed, and who paid for the research? What about "incidental" cocaine laced in other drugs?

Fact-checking is a search for someone to trust, and for some acceptable balance of smaller, true details that amount to one bigger fact. The more you understand about any given thing with all its qualifications, the more you see how slippery "fact" can be. In the case of checking this Bleeding Edge review, the challenge was heightened by seeking out facts about a man so private rumors around him multiplied and verifiable facts became scarce.

I made calls to dead phone lines, and replies to my Quail queries arrived days later, and told me alternately "blocked/failed" or "this recipient does not exist." I argued with a reverend about witchcraft and mercantilism, and overnight ordered an episode of The Simpsons. I met the world's foremost expert on William Pynchon, the fur-trading colonist elected treasurer of the Bay Colony, who escaped back to England after Bostonians burned his book. This kindly old scholar said he'd only ever heard of William's descendent in passing, never mind read the novels. For a few hours I was convinced that the man on the phone was Thomas Pynchon himself, having a laugh.

Pynchon as a young sailor. Photo: ICA

After finding the novelist's son (via Facebook), I found a video of his band (named Facts and Figures) and listened to him play bass (not very well). I cared deeply about Wolf Blitzer's job 12 years ago, Depression-era industry surveys, and just who exactly was on the boat with William the Conqueror back in 1066. It was maddening, especially because Pynchon himself is right here, somewhere in Manhattan.

While I was checking the piece and reading Bleeding Edge, which is set in New York in 2001, the Guardian broke several more stories on the NSA. It seemed less paranoid than apropos that a character calls internet-connected cell phones – barely around in 2001 – "a total Web of surveillance, inescapable … handcuffs of the future". Pynchon didn't have to change the internet a bit to render it Pynchon-ian. By the time he got around to depicting it, bots had begun to index and link, and it was full of lame jokes, technical dissertations, and people living second lives. Pynchon's pop culture references are funny (Furbys, Pokémon) and aggravating (Ace Ventura, Jennifer Aniston's hair) in equal turn, but funny and aggravating apply equally well as descriptors for millennial America.

It's worth considering the novel's story, too, because it was there that I found Pynchon – or at least a reflection of him, and of New York. Some characters kvetch about New York real estate, others do the gentrifying, and "the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by." The Guardian's Theo Tait thought comments like this "Baby Boomer bullshit", yet any glance at Disney's Times Square, the increasingly marginalized South Bronx, or The Grey Lady's output for a decade, and you can see that Pynchon has a point. The ink drawing cartoon New York has bled into real New York's blood for a long time, and people have noticed. The city might elect its next mayor based on a story of two cities, to which Pynchon seems to be asking why not three, five or a hundred? To borrow a phrase from another postmodern giant, this book exposes "the porousness of certain borders".

Plenty of smart readers disagree, and Tait, along with the Times' Michiko Kakutani have taken the author to task for writing "a total mishmash" of "Pynchon Lite". Their criticisms have merit, especially about the lack of believable characters. But New York is "a total mishmash", and I don't think brutal comedy alone is what Pynchon has in mind. When he reaches the very real tragedy of 9/11, all the madcap conspiracies and wordplay recede. The protagonist, a woman named Maxine, can only sit and watch TV, like most Americans did that day, and she's helpless to determine whether her kids' financier father is alive or dead.

The heroine's family, which before this point is peripheral, grows more solid and central to the story. Her sons and husband are quirky, pleasantly familiar, and by far the most charming characters of the book. By turning to the home, Pynchon seems to have turned away from his hunt for truth at all costs. Rather than dwell on abstractions like death, power and history – the stuff that won him a National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow – he's chosen to follow his character who "leaves the question behind". All his old themes are there, as ever, but this book cares more about protecting innocence. To Pynchon, innocence includes a mess of stupid jokes, naïve ideologies, and the act of make-believe, whether in an online city built by the protagonists' sons, or in a novel by a family man on the "Yupper West Side".

As the chase slows down, Pynchon lets surreal, beautiful bits of prose filter in:

"Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman … After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own … At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her."



Bleeding Edge is not Pynchon's best book, nor even in the top five, but it is as wistful as it is wacky. Every book critic, novelist, internet mogul and private eye is as much a living, breathing cartoon as those that Pynchon creates. Whether we see each other as superficial caricatures or flesh and blood is our choice, and we face that choice every time we pass each other, above ground, below it, or online. Thomas Pynchon lives less than a mile from me, and I may have passed him on the street dozens of times. His son and I might know the same people. All those facts that needed checking were there, hidden in plain sight, and the truth is I still only know Pynchon through his books. And that's probably as it should be, even if I only like about half his novels. His questions are mine, and everybody's: not just what "fact" means but whom can you trust, and why we should care about crackpots and capitalists alike. At one point a character notes "the old sad delusion of every insect-free know-it-all in this miserable town. Everybody thinks they live in 'the real world'". With his fiction, Pynchon reminds us of questions we'd forgotten to ask, and that for all we think we know we're just skirting on the surface.