Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s eighth novel, is the best and most surprising thing he’s written since those great books. It dispels any suggestion that, after spawning an entire tradition of comic-digressive and shamelessly intellectual American novels, he had gone peacefully off the boil when he reached his seventies. Against the Day, published without much fanfare in 2006, was a heart-sinking affair for his fans, a swollen, cryptic monster that gestured towards the complexities of earlier masterpieces without matching their unity or inspiration. The amiable Inherent Vice (2009) was a Californian squib in the tradition of the minor novels Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, a Chandlerian whizz through the fag-end of the Sixties accompanied by a fuzz of dope smoke and surf music. But now, 50 years after the publication of Pynchon’s debut novel, Bleeding Edge is at a stroke his 9/11 book, his internet book and – even though it’s set in 2001, back when the suggestion that the state was spying 24/7 on its citizens was still tinfoil-hat speculation rather than vivid reality – the first great fictional work of the post-PRISM age.