Tweet
Maybe There’s a Whole Other Internet
‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ May Be the Novel of the Summer
By DWIGHT GARNER
Is it too late to nominate a candidate for novel of the summer?
David Shafer’s first book, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” is a paranoid, sarcastic and clattering pop thriller that reads as if it were torn from the damp pages of Glenn Greenwald’s fever journal. It’s about a multinational cabal that plans to subjugate humanity by privatizing all information.
In “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” there are trace elements of DeLillo, of Pynchon, of Philip K. Dick, of the Hari Kunzru of “Transmission,” of the Neal Stephenson of “Cryptonomicon,” those usual suspects from whom all would-be techno-dystopianists borrow. Which is to say that the author is highly in touch with how “paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” as Dick explained in “A Scanner Darkly.”
What puts this novel across isn’t its lucid, post-Patriot Act thematics, however, as righteous as they are. Instead, it’s that the storyteller in Mr. Shafer isn’t at war with the thinker and the word man in him; he’s got a sick wit and a high style. Reading his prose is like popping a variant of the red pill in “The Matrix”: Everything gets a little crisper. The sunsets torch the horizon with increased fire.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” follows three characters, each in his or her 30s, each vivid and loose-limbed. Two of them, Leo and Mark, were best friends at Harvard. (Mr. Shafer graduated from Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School. He now lives in Portland, Ore.)
There’s a class element at work in their friendship, now broken. Leo came from money but fizzled out. He’s a stoner, an imbiber of gin at breakfast, a failed bookstore owner turned issuer of letterpress manifestoes about vast conspiracies. He may or may not have a clinical personality disorder. Mark, who grew up poor, is an accidental and fatuous self-help guru. He’s the life coach to an almost certainly maleficent Big Data C.E.O.
Finally, there’s Leila, an idealistic Persian-American nonprofit worker trying to import medical supplies into remote parts of Myanmar. She’s fierce, funny, wary. “She’d gone this long without getting raped,” Mr. Shafer writes about her time in Afghanistan, Myanmar and elsewhere, “and it was her daily, specific intention to continue that way.” Traveling deep in country, she sees something she isn’t supposed to see and ends up being tailed by supreme baddies.
It wouldn’t be polite to spill much of this book’s plot. Suffice it to say that some of these characters join a dissident underground group, one with some hippie élan — this crew might have popped, like a watermelon seed, out of a T. C. Boyle novel — that’s committed to fighting the data-mining goons.
There’s plenty to fight. “Was there another Internet besides the one she knew about?” Leila thinks at one point. Are our search engines the only search engines? The answers to these questions fill this novel’s sails. Once the oligarchy knows everything about you, after you’ve been willingly equipped with digital contact lenses that let them see what you see, it can fry the Internet we have and upload its own.
This sort of narrative can tip, very easily, into a crude outline for a mediocre Tom Cruise or Matt Damon movie. (Note to Matt Damon: Make this movie anyway.) Mr. Shafer doesn’t let this happen.
There’s too much offbeat humor. Where are the resistance force’s nighttime dormitories? In the showroom bedrooms at Ikea stores. In one climactic scene, these characters are chased through Powell’s, the venerable Portland bookstore. When it’s time for a Schwarzeneggian action movie catchphrase, this novel’s “Hasta la vista, baby,” here’s what’s coyly delivered: “I told you that you shoulda voted for Nader.”
Leo, the trust fund kid, goes so far downhill early in the novel that a list of bummers in his life ends this way: “Then his pot dealer cut him off. Out of concern! Like pot dealers are bound by the Hippocratic oath.”
This is another way of saying that Mr. Shafer gets the playfulness-to-paranoia ratio about exactly right. He also delivers plausibly cool technology — remote seabed units called serve-whales, cloud computing that communicates with, and through, plants.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is a page-turner, yet many more “literary” writers will, I suspect, envy Mr. Shafer’s tactile prose. His eye is hawklike.
A popular cookbook is full of “breezy instructions rich in kinetic verbs.” On a massive corporate ship, “there was a zing in the air, the kind produced when subjugated staff members move swiftly through corridors.” The doors at a rehab center “made a sort of sucky spaceship sound when they were opened and closed.”
Through Leila, Mr. Shafer delivers a memo to us all about why we all should understand something about the guts of the wired world: “Why didn’t she know more about computers? That knowledge suddenly seemed more important than feminist theory or ’80s song lyrics, both of which she was well acquainted with. Computers had risen around her all her life, like a lake sneakily subsuming more and more arable land, but she’s never learned to write code or poke behind the icons or anything like that. She was like a medieval peasant confounded by books and easily impressed by stained glass.”
This novel’s politics emerge from the anti-authoritarian left, but they’re not knee-jerk. One sympathetic character is vexed by “liberals who walked around all un-blown-up claiming that they liked their civil liberties more than their security.” Leila is keenly aware that she is “a big fat Western consumer.” This novel asks, “Who among us deserves all he has?”
Embedded in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is, finally, a satisfying love story, one so tangled in numbers and suspicious of malware that when one character locks eyes with another and says, “I’m your square root,” it seems romantic, not robotic.
Mr. Shafer has written a bright, brash entertainment, one that errs, when it errs at all, on the side of generosity, narrative and otherwise. It tips you, geekily and humanely, through the looking glass.
‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’ May Be the Novel of the Summer
By DWIGHT GARNER
Is it too late to nominate a candidate for novel of the summer?
David Shafer’s first book, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” is a paranoid, sarcastic and clattering pop thriller that reads as if it were torn from the damp pages of Glenn Greenwald’s fever journal. It’s about a multinational cabal that plans to subjugate humanity by privatizing all information.
In “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” there are trace elements of DeLillo, of Pynchon, of Philip K. Dick, of the Hari Kunzru of “Transmission,” of the Neal Stephenson of “Cryptonomicon,” those usual suspects from whom all would-be techno-dystopianists borrow. Which is to say that the author is highly in touch with how “paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” as Dick explained in “A Scanner Darkly.”
What puts this novel across isn’t its lucid, post-Patriot Act thematics, however, as righteous as they are. Instead, it’s that the storyteller in Mr. Shafer isn’t at war with the thinker and the word man in him; he’s got a sick wit and a high style. Reading his prose is like popping a variant of the red pill in “The Matrix”: Everything gets a little crisper. The sunsets torch the horizon with increased fire.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” follows three characters, each in his or her 30s, each vivid and loose-limbed. Two of them, Leo and Mark, were best friends at Harvard. (Mr. Shafer graduated from Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School. He now lives in Portland, Ore.)
There’s a class element at work in their friendship, now broken. Leo came from money but fizzled out. He’s a stoner, an imbiber of gin at breakfast, a failed bookstore owner turned issuer of letterpress manifestoes about vast conspiracies. He may or may not have a clinical personality disorder. Mark, who grew up poor, is an accidental and fatuous self-help guru. He’s the life coach to an almost certainly maleficent Big Data C.E.O.
Finally, there’s Leila, an idealistic Persian-American nonprofit worker trying to import medical supplies into remote parts of Myanmar. She’s fierce, funny, wary. “She’d gone this long without getting raped,” Mr. Shafer writes about her time in Afghanistan, Myanmar and elsewhere, “and it was her daily, specific intention to continue that way.” Traveling deep in country, she sees something she isn’t supposed to see and ends up being tailed by supreme baddies.
It wouldn’t be polite to spill much of this book’s plot. Suffice it to say that some of these characters join a dissident underground group, one with some hippie élan — this crew might have popped, like a watermelon seed, out of a T. C. Boyle novel — that’s committed to fighting the data-mining goons.
There’s plenty to fight. “Was there another Internet besides the one she knew about?” Leila thinks at one point. Are our search engines the only search engines? The answers to these questions fill this novel’s sails. Once the oligarchy knows everything about you, after you’ve been willingly equipped with digital contact lenses that let them see what you see, it can fry the Internet we have and upload its own.
This sort of narrative can tip, very easily, into a crude outline for a mediocre Tom Cruise or Matt Damon movie. (Note to Matt Damon: Make this movie anyway.) Mr. Shafer doesn’t let this happen.
There’s too much offbeat humor. Where are the resistance force’s nighttime dormitories? In the showroom bedrooms at Ikea stores. In one climactic scene, these characters are chased through Powell’s, the venerable Portland bookstore. When it’s time for a Schwarzeneggian action movie catchphrase, this novel’s “Hasta la vista, baby,” here’s what’s coyly delivered: “I told you that you shoulda voted for Nader.”
Leo, the trust fund kid, goes so far downhill early in the novel that a list of bummers in his life ends this way: “Then his pot dealer cut him off. Out of concern! Like pot dealers are bound by the Hippocratic oath.”
This is another way of saying that Mr. Shafer gets the playfulness-to-paranoia ratio about exactly right. He also delivers plausibly cool technology — remote seabed units called serve-whales, cloud computing that communicates with, and through, plants.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is a page-turner, yet many more “literary” writers will, I suspect, envy Mr. Shafer’s tactile prose. His eye is hawklike.
A popular cookbook is full of “breezy instructions rich in kinetic verbs.” On a massive corporate ship, “there was a zing in the air, the kind produced when subjugated staff members move swiftly through corridors.” The doors at a rehab center “made a sort of sucky spaceship sound when they were opened and closed.”
Through Leila, Mr. Shafer delivers a memo to us all about why we all should understand something about the guts of the wired world: “Why didn’t she know more about computers? That knowledge suddenly seemed more important than feminist theory or ’80s song lyrics, both of which she was well acquainted with. Computers had risen around her all her life, like a lake sneakily subsuming more and more arable land, but she’s never learned to write code or poke behind the icons or anything like that. She was like a medieval peasant confounded by books and easily impressed by stained glass.”
This novel’s politics emerge from the anti-authoritarian left, but they’re not knee-jerk. One sympathetic character is vexed by “liberals who walked around all un-blown-up claiming that they liked their civil liberties more than their security.” Leila is keenly aware that she is “a big fat Western consumer.” This novel asks, “Who among us deserves all he has?”
Embedded in “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is, finally, a satisfying love story, one so tangled in numbers and suspicious of malware that when one character locks eyes with another and says, “I’m your square root,” it seems romantic, not robotic.
Mr. Shafer has written a bright, brash entertainment, one that errs, when it errs at all, on the side of generosity, narrative and otherwise. It tips you, geekily and humanely, through the looking glass.
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
By David Shafer
425 pages. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company. $26.
Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow — Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?
By Pankaj Mishra
Hatred of popular culture was to define a generation of American intellectuals and their claim to a superior sensibility.
“Art,” the Russian writer Alexander Herzen wrote in 1862, “is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, thrifty house of the petit bourgeois.” In exile in London from the czarist autocracy, Herzen had come to despise the commercial society brought forth by industrial capitalism in Western Europe. The “interests of the countinghouse and bourgeois prosperity” in his view made for an “increasing superficiality of life.” Herzen feared that in its “obliteration of individuality,” Europe risked becoming a “second China.”
As for the New World, it was an extreme case of leveling by the profit motive, or what John Stuart Mill called “collective mediocrity.” “The American states,” Herzen wrote, “present the spectacle of one class — the middle class — with nothing below it and nothing above it.” Artists and intellectuals fleeing Europe for America in the 1920s and ‘30s found this painfully confirmed. Eminent filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, demoted to serfdom in Hollywood studios, found themselves pleasing a homogeneous “crowd” — for which lowly purpose, Herzen had warned, “art shouts, gesticulates, lies and exaggerates.”
Exposed in Germany to devastatingly effective right-wing propaganda, Jewish émigrés like Theodor Adorno were naturally hostile to mass-produced culture, denouncing television for promoting the “very smugness, intellectual passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds.” Hatred of popular culture was also to define a generation of American intellectuals, and their claim to a superior sensibility. In the 1930s, Clement Greenberg famously prescribed modernism as the antidote to the inferior cravings of mass man, sneering at The New Yorker for repackaging kitsch to socially ambitious Americans. Dwight Macdonald went on to excoriate the middlebrow, or what he called “Midcult,” made for folks who wish to accumulate cultural capital without having to work too hard.
Edmund Wilson assailing the cult of Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal mocking Cahiers du Cinéma for elevating hired hands such as Howard Hawks into auteurs, Lionel Trilling with his aversion to the movies — all lamented, in different ways, the destruction of an arduous ideal of self-cultivation by the philistines of the modern world.
That process seems unstoppable in an age that is culturally, if not economically, more egalitarian. Adorno would have been distressed to see “Mad Men,” a shrine to what Marxists used to call “commodity fetishism,” revered by a bourgeois elite that ought to have subsidized atonal music (though he might have found his saturnine outlook pleasurably validated by “Breaking Bad” and “True Detective”).
Such distinctions as lowbrow, highbrow and middlebrow are now mostly useful in identifying their early adopters: a tiny minority of artists and intellectuals who felt a sense of siege as capitalism became global. Political defeat, isolation and irrelevance had devastated their old presuppositions about art and its relation to human beings. Modernism was their last desperate attempt to reimagine modernity, to move beyond bourgeois notions of representation and harmony. But it turned out to be a patchy and mostly elitist phenomenon.
Modernism is not even a memory in large parts of the world where capitalist modernity completes its work of annihilating traditional cultures and imposing the harsh imperatives of economic rationalization. In India, millions of rural migrants move straight from folk enactments of the “Ramayana” to local imitations of Fox News and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Television, now supplemented by social media, may yet diminish the postindustrial West into the listless and sterile China of Herzen’s fearful imagination. But it is a “rising” China that seems to be obliterating individuality much more vigorously with, among other things, clones of “American Idol” and “The Voice.”
Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics: A Novel,” which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and “From the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013.
By David Shafer
425 pages. Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company. $26.
Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow — Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?
By Pankaj Mishra
Hatred of popular culture was to define a generation of American intellectuals and their claim to a superior sensibility.
“Art,” the Russian writer Alexander Herzen wrote in 1862, “is not at ease in the stiff, over-neat, thrifty house of the petit bourgeois.” In exile in London from the czarist autocracy, Herzen had come to despise the commercial society brought forth by industrial capitalism in Western Europe. The “interests of the countinghouse and bourgeois prosperity” in his view made for an “increasing superficiality of life.” Herzen feared that in its “obliteration of individuality,” Europe risked becoming a “second China.”
As for the New World, it was an extreme case of leveling by the profit motive, or what John Stuart Mill called “collective mediocrity.” “The American states,” Herzen wrote, “present the spectacle of one class — the middle class — with nothing below it and nothing above it.” Artists and intellectuals fleeing Europe for America in the 1920s and ‘30s found this painfully confirmed. Eminent filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, demoted to serfdom in Hollywood studios, found themselves pleasing a homogeneous “crowd” — for which lowly purpose, Herzen had warned, “art shouts, gesticulates, lies and exaggerates.”
Exposed in Germany to devastatingly effective right-wing propaganda, Jewish émigrés like Theodor Adorno were naturally hostile to mass-produced culture, denouncing television for promoting the “very smugness, intellectual passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds.” Hatred of popular culture was also to define a generation of American intellectuals, and their claim to a superior sensibility. In the 1930s, Clement Greenberg famously prescribed modernism as the antidote to the inferior cravings of mass man, sneering at The New Yorker for repackaging kitsch to socially ambitious Americans. Dwight Macdonald went on to excoriate the middlebrow, or what he called “Midcult,” made for folks who wish to accumulate cultural capital without having to work too hard.
Edmund Wilson assailing the cult of Agatha Christie, Gore Vidal mocking Cahiers du Cinéma for elevating hired hands such as Howard Hawks into auteurs, Lionel Trilling with his aversion to the movies — all lamented, in different ways, the destruction of an arduous ideal of self-cultivation by the philistines of the modern world.
That process seems unstoppable in an age that is culturally, if not economically, more egalitarian. Adorno would have been distressed to see “Mad Men,” a shrine to what Marxists used to call “commodity fetishism,” revered by a bourgeois elite that ought to have subsidized atonal music (though he might have found his saturnine outlook pleasurably validated by “Breaking Bad” and “True Detective”).
Such distinctions as lowbrow, highbrow and middlebrow are now mostly useful in identifying their early adopters: a tiny minority of artists and intellectuals who felt a sense of siege as capitalism became global. Political defeat, isolation and irrelevance had devastated their old presuppositions about art and its relation to human beings. Modernism was their last desperate attempt to reimagine modernity, to move beyond bourgeois notions of representation and harmony. But it turned out to be a patchy and mostly elitist phenomenon.
Modernism is not even a memory in large parts of the world where capitalist modernity completes its work of annihilating traditional cultures and imposing the harsh imperatives of economic rationalization. In India, millions of rural migrants move straight from folk enactments of the “Ramayana” to local imitations of Fox News and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Television, now supplemented by social media, may yet diminish the postindustrial West into the listless and sterile China of Herzen’s fearful imagination. But it is a “rising” China that seems to be obliterating individuality much more vigorously with, among other things, clones of “American Idol” and “The Voice.”
Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics: A Novel,” which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and “From the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013.
you.
Comment