Author: MT Anderson
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WARTY!
Seriously?
The fact that this novel won a pretentious book prize should be quite sufficient to warn you away from it, safe in the knowledge that it has nothing new or interesting to relate. Indeed, it has as little to offer as the back of the guy's head on the cover: nothing engaging, no features, bland, undifferentiated. If you pronounce the author's first two initials as 'empty' this will give you a realistic picture of what this novel offers. That Anderson is now writing nondescript and cheesy children's books is quite revelatory about what he can bring to a novel.
If you like nauseating music, then by all means listen to the pretentious introductory noise at the start of this. This novel is awful. I think it would even give the most party-hearty frat boys a large headache to go. If you rub it on your skin it will give you a bad irrational, with the emphasis on rash. This is a stream of unconsciousness story, a beat poem by someone who's beat and has no poetry, a road-trip novel that's roadkill.
Titus and his friends (Link, Callista, Quendi, Unit, Marty) take a trip to the moon because they become bored with giving themselves electric shocks from some bare wires sticking out of the wall. In short, these people are morons and in the worst possible sense.
I honestly thought, for the longest time, that they were robots. At least that would have made some kind of a story, but it turns out they're human - if you can call a terminally mindless, verbal diarrhea-spewing being 'human'. Do I really need to hear a novel about complete numb-skulls that's not even remotely funny? No. That's why this was a DNF, and happily so; I couldn't even finish one CD, let alone go through five.
The author tries so, so hard to be hip and to create new lingo to portray this future he created, but he's no Anthony Burgess. The narrator doesn't help. He's perfect for the story, but that's the problem. For the one thing there is no story, and for the other, the narrator sounds like a really annoying kid who gets on a crowded train with you early in the morning after he's been out doing drugs and partying all night.
He thinks he's had the best time possible, and insists upon relating every last boring detail of it in a machine-gun monotone, blathering one mindless thing after another, none of which is remotely unusual, interesting or has any point. Meanwhile, you're desperately trying to focus on this great novel you're reading before you have to put it aside and start work when the train gets in. Yeah, it's that soul-destroyingly irritating and life-wasting.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the Feed had actually had something to say, or something new to reveal, but it doesn't. Not one thing. Its totally unoriginal premise is the exact opposite of what Timothy Leary advised. Instead of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, this novel insists that being connected to the feed (surfing the Internet) all the time is bad and you should do other stuff too. No shit?
In trying so very, very hard to be youch, Anderson's novel becomes meg null. Cut yourself off from this Feed and find something which will nourish, not numb, your mind.
