Not for the faint of mind, but a forceful testament to the uphill struggle of pioneer programmers.
A blistering drama about love, hate, and psychopathy.
Ullman, one of the first women in cyberspace, guided readers to the innermost circle of computerdom in the 1997 memoir Close to the Machine. Her first fiction—which descends back into this realm of basement cafés and windowless break rooms, of buzzing fluorescents, whining computers, and cussing hackers—sustains a haunting tone of revulsion mingled with nostalgia. This artful tension distinguishes heroine Roberta Walton, who tells about the dramatic undoing in 1984 of Ethan Levin, a slightly odious but efficient programmer plagued by a highly odious but efficient computer bug. Roberta is the failed academic who, between cigarette breaks, tests Ethan’s programs. Her discovery of the bug, dubbed “Jester” by cutthroat colleagues, stirs Ethan to humiliate Roberta during a Telligentsia staff meeting. (Ironically, the event will trigger Roberta’s rise from lowly tester to wealthy consultant.) Harassed and embarrassed, Ethan escapes at night into a simulated world he programmed. But Jester keeps freezing Telligentsia’s system during presentations to investors, and Ethan, slipping into deepest paranoia, links its origin to his girlfriend’s taking of a lover. He confronts neighbors about loud music, complains about odd environmental stimuli at work, and soon he’s wearing a purple headband over earplugs and lowering a blue parachute over his desk. Desperate, he turns to Roberta, and the two forge an unlikely closeness. But Ethan is beyond hope. Ullman, who relies on dramatic irony to advance her plot, overplays it during the crawling conclusion, and her misguided generosity extends also to arcane descriptions, with a penchant for technobabble—akin to Updike’s similarly flawed Roger’s Version—that detracts from an otherwise fine novel: a story that, at its best, finds in computers the same eerie allure that DeLillo’s White Noise found in televisions.
Not for the faint of mind, but a forceful testament to the uphill struggle of pioneer programmers.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50860-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blistering sendup of startup culture and a sprawling, ambitious, tender debut.
Startup culture and science fiction collide in this debut novel about love, loss, and coming-of-age.
Lucas and Margo are best friends, or something like it. The two cynical 20-somethings brave the oppressive Whiteness of startup culture together, downing beers at the bar around the corner from their office and commiserating about their clueless, immoral bosses. "Being black means you're merely a body—a fragile body," confesses Margo, a talented engineer with a penchant for SF, over drinks. "If there was a machine that could do it, I'd change places with you right now, Lucas….I would be an Asian man and I would move through the world unnoticed and nobody would bother me." In retaliation for being pushed out of their company, Margo decides to steal user data and convinces cautious Lucas to help. But when she is suddenly struck and killed by a car, Lucas is left to navigate their theft—and the emotional roller coaster of working in big tech as a minority—on his own. Nguyen, a former digital deputy editor for GQ and a veteran of Google and Amazon, has a keen eye for satire. He illuminates how "lean" startup companies led by young White men with little management experience manufacture crises only to dodge responsibilities to their users and staff. "I started Phantom with lofty principles, and I haven't given up on them," says one CEO without irony. "But we'll never achieve those ideals...if we run out of money first." Running alongside the dystopian horrors of Nguyen's workplace satire are the warmth and humor, sadness and vulnerability of Lucas' and Margo's voices. Using text messages, voicemails, message board posts, and short story snippets, Nguyen's novel spirals inward to capture the hang-ups, cultural obsessions, and fuzzy ambitions of his characters. "I'd hoped leaving behind all my material possessions would mean leaving behind all the things I'd become: a cruel friend, a workplace creep, an alcoholic," Lucas muses from his new, nomadic life in Tokyo. "Or maybe I was all those things to begin with." At last confronted with his own poor romantic and workplace behavior, Lucas must decide how he will honor his friend's memory and whether he will work to become a better person in the hazy promise—or possible tragedy—of the future.
A blistering sendup of startup culture and a sprawling, ambitious, tender debut.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984855-23-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
None
Cornelius Buddy Suttree shares the three-fold plight of nearly all Cormac McCarthy heroes: he is an unregenerate loner-outsider, his unwavering isolation is never fully accounted for, and his present life and station are described with a poetic force that at once overwhelms and repels analysis. Suttree has left his well-to-do Knoxville family, has bought an old houseboat, and makes his living off the fiver as a fisherman (it is the early 1950s). We follow him for three years through layerings of experience that have very little effect on his character. Suttree lives among the most submerged folks ever born to crawl and die in fiction, "thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees—" as he is told while next to death from typhoid fever. His is a very long story with no plot, only episodes in the workhouse, fishing, spending the time of day with ragpickers, white trash, and bottom-dog blacks, drinking and puking, coming into money through an inheritance (only $300) or through a whore who falls for him but goes out of her mind. Only one other character stands out: young Harrogate, a Snopesian hayseed arrested for intercourse with watermelons— a splendid comic creation. McCarthy's idiosyncratic vocabulary and chronic verbal excesses will put off a lot of readers, but there is a cumulative power and occasional beauty in the relentless wretchedness that Suttree and his biographer wallow in.
None NonePub Date: Feb. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0679736328
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
PERSPECTIVES
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