New Novel by Pynchon Bleeding Edge Features a Perfumer Character {Fragrant Readings}

The Penguin press release offers this titbit which will be of interest to the community of perfume writing readers: Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon, his latest novel, features a secondary character who is "a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave". There are also "various bloggers"...

If all this sounds familiar it's because the context is "the early days of the internet" in 2001. The story takes place in New York City relying on a detective narrative whose central character is a woman, Maxine Tarnow, a mom of two boys still linked to "her sort of semi-exhusband Horst" also experiencing a new level of freedom as she does not hold a license anymore and can now follow her own customized code of ethics. Her specialty is fraud investigation. 

"With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since."

The book is reportedly still in the process of being written. Date of availability has been set for September 2013. 

Interestingly enough tomorrow debuts a new TV series on French TV entitled Candice Renoir featuring a policewoman main character with some similitudes to Maxine Tarnow: she is a mom of four, is separated from her husband and goes back on duty after a 10-year hiatus where she followed her husband abroad. She is a little bit of an outsider character despite the fact that she is a Major.

Zeitgeist, it's called.