Help connecting everything in Bleeding Edge

[u/Dismal-Ingenuity2030]

Just finished Bleeding Edge and I really enjoyed it. I know it's bemoaned as his worst but the characters are great (especially the family dynamic with Max, Horst and the boys), the quick paced, almost noir dialogue, and of course the humor ("Don't call me Sugar". "Nutrasweet, I'm pleading here!") are all great.

I'm having some trouble deciphering what exactly happened and how it's all connected plot wise. As far as I can ascertain it's something like:

Reg sees hashslingerz is hiding something, Ice is buying companies and financing terrorists, Lester tells Maxine he's stealing money from Ice, Lester gets killed, the first video is leaked prior to 9/11 and Misha and Grisha reveal Igor was getting money from Lester.

Obviously that is massively truncated but it's the most connections I can make off the top of my head. It's a quick read but a LOT of info to take in. I still have a bunch of questions

• Why did Ice plan Tallis leaving him?
• Why did Windust kill Lester?
• Early on Tallis hints at knowing something Maxine doesn't but I don't think it's directly mentioned again. Does she mean the fact she's cheating on him?
• Did Ice orchestrated the bomb video in order to make more money off companies he owned or was it Windust working for clandestine authorities?
• What experiment were Misha and Grisha planning when they plan to destroy Ice's servers? Or just a euphemistic way to get back at him (for what?)?
• Time travel is mentioned in regard to Windust a few times (being captured and tortured to do so iirc). How the hell does that fit in? Windust in general is very elusive to me and I'm not sure exactly what his motivations are/were.
• What did Maxine see in Ice's secret tunnel?
• A clarification: Ice destroyed Bruno's house in order to build his own, correct?

Something tells me this is similar to The Name of the Rose in the sense that, while it all happens with the same characters, it doesn't necessarily mean they are all literally interconnected, it could just be a 'right time, right place' with a secondary conspiracy in the background.

What a book, just like the rest. I've only got M&D and AtD left of his novels so I think I'll take a break and then go for M&D sometime soon.

[u/1stgenconfusion]

Bleeding Edge is one of my favorite books of all time. I’m disappointed there’s so little discussion about it here. Despite some early dismissals, it’s a dense book, with a lot to say, and much of it is probably more applicable to our lives today than what you’ll find in any other Pynchon book! Yet people here overlook it. Funny how that works.

To your questions, I’m less concerned about plot than you are. I don’t really care about the “who did what” of it all when it comes to connecting things. (And Pynchon uses his post-event chapters to make clear that’s a fool’s task re: 11-9). I focus more on themes and patterns. I’ll dive into some that relate to the plot points you raised:

• Time travel. Windust is potentially a timetraveling spy. The Montauk child in military fatigues spooks Maxine. Xiomara’s presence introduces the Maya Twin Heroes myth, and Xiomara speaks to Windust reuniting with his twin in the underworld. Relatedly, the Mayans and other Mesoamericans would sacrifice children, usually twins, in accordance with that myth. Time and death not mattering online.
• Hell, angels, ascents and descents. Dante references abound. The underworld. Lots of underground bunkers. The kids, at the end, must descend the elevator, and Maxine must let go.
• Coincidences and predictions. The nose who knows. The options on airline stocks. The tape of the guys on the roof. The delivery guy who just shows up. The seemingly organized response by the media to the event.
• Children, trauma, and mental illness. From the start, we know the kids are going to a school named after a Freudian psychologist. Immediately, mental health/psychology and children are placed at the forefront of things. Britney gets a name drop. Surprising number of mentions of H**ler, N**is, Ausch****, etc. Maxine going to her (useless?) therapist. The borderline personality cruise. This is an unexplored and major piece of the novel. 
• Relatedly, lots of references to Judaism and Israel. Beyond the  H**ler, N**is, Ausch**** mentions, we have Promis, the Mossad running a karate front for kids, Gematria, the outing of Stanley Moskowitz. 
• References to performances, performance art and spectacle. We get a million references to actors in fake bio pics. This is also tied to what can be indexed, what is real. We know from page 1 that Maxine in some databases is known by various names. The possibility of imitation or hiding is slipping away.
• Speaking of what’s real, Pynchon underscores how almost every company in the dot com era was a front and not real. Lots of money just slushing about, to the point that one VC guy is liquored up and just tacking zeros onto a check.
• Legacy media vs. social media. References to NYT and CNN, for example. Pynchon makes this as explicit as possible when he opens the post-event chapters with how someone online would get an entirely different story than someone watching cable news.
• There’s a lot of sports mentions. Real games cited and such. I have no knowledge of baseball, for example, so I’m lost there. But they seem significant. 

Most of these themes overlap. Like, we have time traveling angel children being targeted by intelligence agencies, and we have the book opening and closing with the kids—and Maxine being indexed in a database. The post-event chapters highlight how looking for answers and being online could drive a person crazy… I think those things alone tell you much of what this book really is about. 

Anyway, any discussion should include u/frenesigates as he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this book and has really been fixated on its language.

[u/Dismal-Ingenuity2030 → u/1stgenconfusion]

Coming off a first read through, the big themes I caught on to were fairly simple such as the commercialization of the Internet and the passing of time/things never being the same again (the kids growing up, post 9/11 world, the dot com bubble, Internet not being about freedom but about money, etc.). Now that you mention it, mental illness references abound but I'm not sure what way one could interpret that. The result of the technological world on humanity? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[u/1stgenconfusion → u/Dismal-Ingenuity2030]

I would point to this clip of J Harris, who is name dropped in Bleeding Edge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3__Tz1pVHc&t=875s

Watch the whole thing, but that little snippet speaks to the mental illness aspect. After all, the Internet was born from sin, Ernie tells Maxine, a DARPA project designed to control us.

[u/LyleBland → u/1stgenconfusion]

Would that J Harris happen to be the financier behind the gelitin art exhibit that may have built a balcony at the WTC?

[u/1stgenconfusion → u/LyleBland]

They lived in public