Mark Doten

This curate's egg of an experimental novel reminded me more than a little of the storied sandwich of many a joke which consists of two luscious slices of bread with an odious meat inserted between; it begins with an intriguing (if presented with the unpleasant literary parlor trick of twentysome pages of runon sentences) narration of World War III being initiated by the President of the United States as he pilots the flagship of his worldwide zeppelin passenger fleet, and ends with a hilarious sendup of his rhetorical style as he narrates the last day of the world as we know it. In between, unfortunately, one must wade through two hundred pages of a leaden (but nonetheless thin), uninteresting, fragmentary, at times incomprehensible, plot presented mostly with huge dollops of computer jargon and internet in-references. Contrary to the reviews, this book is rarely funny; I've not read a blacker book, and I'm hardpressed to think of a single likable character herein, certainly not the narrator, who manages to be at one and the same time self-hating and ego-tripping. If you come to this with a solid background in computer lingo and chatroom bafflegab and low expectations, you might not be let down.… (altro)

I mean, I don't know. I read this at the wrong time, and I knew it. It was just a race between the "for-sell-by" date on the internet and twitter references passing and my interest in it. Can I even critique this in any meaningful way? I've emerged feeling like I'm trying to evaluate sober the movie you saw drunk last night. Yes, I mean, I know what happened, but I can't say anything about it. And, it's not just, I think, a case of the usual aggrievement for me (although it is, also, that, to be honest): namely, the mainstream/non-genre writer doing genre shit and not caring enough/being willing enough/having balls enough to actually treat their genre shit like genre shit, the Leftovers [both novel and series] being the case par exemplar, although it operates a bit differently here. There, they're dismissing the genre in the service of a general Flattening Out of everything. Here, we have an MFA-ish novelist writing something genre that doesn't understand those beats [ending the final twenty pages with her editor and his troubles and the two of them deciding whether or not to run for it while in the snow at prospect park and ending with a line of them doing it like this is the fucking Giver or something or that we're supposed to feel anything about either of them as characters or even together (??) ~ the thirty page internet meme deathhole disquisition leading itself to ... where?], something satirical that doesn't actually know what it's satirizing [the gd hot air balloon, and the final livestreamrambling speech are heightened, exaggerated representations of a core trumpiness, but so heightened as to mask the fact that his general "point" about trump and the situation is -- in addition to just being jumbled -- wholly based on fear of his nuclear rashness, something that needn't be heightened along the lines of the blimp], something experimental that spends much of its time in straightforward narrativization/prose/plot land [as if he just got tired of it all after that twenty-page, unbroken-paragraph opening section, which (most damningly) was not even that engaging] something surreal that spends most of its time in Normy land [the general's unexpected BJ], and something political that doesn't care about politics [think about Birdcrash -- who is the villain here?] Regardless, the story: post-nuclear apocalypse, near 300 million dead in US [ha, come on man], caused by Trump but after a worldwide internet outage by some hacktivist collective days before that spurred global upheaval, in the aftermath a reporter works on an article abt internet humor and we thus see chapters devoted to reimagining actual meme culture as it would look applied to the apocalypse, and from here she is kidnapped and tortured by the dude who took down the internet [drilling holes in her head] cause he's crazy and wants to make an internet of birds [ok that's the best part].… (altro)