Author: Max Barry
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!
This is a really short novel which is vaguely reminiscent of William Gibson's approach to writing dystopian futures, mated with Jasper Fforde's humor, and delivered by a midwife named Monty Python to add just a soupçon of crazy. You'd think that would be a delight, wouldn't you?
Set in a world pretty much owned (even moreso than now) by commerce, no one has a life except as a hair on the ass of big business. So pervasive is this ownership that your last name is taken from the corporation for which you work. If you switch jobs you have to change your "family" name. Thus, Jennifer Government works for...yes! the government! John Nike (one of two) is a vice president for Nike. Hayley MacDonalds goes to MacDonald's corporate high school.
The two Johns (named that way advisedly, I presume) cook-up a scheme to promote their new brand of Nike shoes: assassinate ten buyers of the shoes to give this brand some street cred. They persuade one of their employees, Hack Nike, to sign a contract for the, er contract, but he has second thoughts, and goes to the police. They tell him that they would be willing to take over the contract. He's happy to have them do this, but in turn, they contract it out to the NRA, who end-up killing more than the allowed quota. Jennifer Government tries to nail the Nikes for this crime.
I'd like to know how the hell Barry got away with this without being sued to his shoes by Nike, without being grilled by MacDonalds, and without being shot a stern email from the NRA. I guess he's fairly low profile (I'd never heard of him before I happened upon this audio book in the local library). I guess, also, that if you sneak the word 'satire' into the book somewhere near the front, if not right on the cover, then you get a bye?
I didn't like this. While some small pieces were amusing, it was overall rambling and nonsensical, and most importantly, it didn't deliver on the contract the author makes with the reader, to deliver an engrossing and entertaining read.
