There's always something about Pynchon that renders me mute. Too much to talk about, I suppose. It's always hard to find a place to start. 
 So this is a novel 'about' Silicon Alley in the early 2000s during the Yuppie Babylon of the tech boom and the first months of the Giuliani/Bush regime. Our protagonist, Maxine, reminds me of Oedipa from Crying of Lot 49 a bit, as a professional women who is gradually entangled into a conspiracy of unknowable and incorporeal proportions. It's not as vast as Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day, but very few books really are. It's actually easy for a Pynchon, even easier than Lot 49 or Inherent Vice. 
 It's sometimes unbecoming to 'compare' various parts of an author's collective work, but Pynchon has produced so much that it's easier to point out more common trends. There is still a taste for doggerel, for hilarious puns, silly names and sex jokes. 
 About halfway through the book, 9/11 happens. I won't count this as a spoiler for there is a continuous sense of foreboding in the chapters preceding it, but he still makes it affecting, but not melodramatic or kitschy. I mention this because Pynchon's fondness for the coping mechanisms of conspiracy theories makes an appearance here as well, although he is actually very restrained compared to some of the more outrageous possibilities I've heard. (No laser beams or lizard people.) 
 That leads to the other main theme of the book -- the Internet. Instead of a 'cyberpunk' view of what the Internet might be in the future, he instead takes a historical interpretation of its past. This is the Internet Version 1.0, before Goodreads, Facebook, or even Myspace. Even in this cruder form, still dominated by IRC chat and BBS boards, the Internet still represented a faster yet still unknown means of communication. I do not rightly know whether the 'Deep Web' Pynchon describes existed then, but it certainly does today. Secret things are said and done here, and people act without restraint when they are anonymous and have no social restraints or inhibitions. 
 Pynchon is also eerily prescient, and this is one of those eras where it is more prevalent to whisper on conspiracies and fear. It might be only a matter of good timing that this book was released a few short months after Edward Snowden's revelations, but Pynchon's questions seem more relevant now, about the non-neutrality of technology and how it is used and co-opted by power. Perhaps right after that age of euphoria, we had a reminder that we were all living on foundations of fragile steel, which will bend and break as history moves on.