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We may not have hover-cars or, thankfully, Big Brother, but we are living in a previous generation’s science fiction. Alien, Soylent Green, Neuromancer, Robocop, Rollerball and plenty of others all include what is now both a hackneyed trope and arguably a fact of real life: the all-powerful corporation. Usually portrayed as callous, bigger than governments and greedy to the point of madness - and staffed by backstabbing, coke-addled sociopaths - the corporation is a pretty familiar villain. And, if you look at the environmental disasters, political funding scandals and banking crises of recent times, it’s hard to believe that the companies don’t already run the show.
Jennifer Government by Max Barry is set in a strange, only slightly unlikely world where capitalism has gone berserk. Essentially, every possible function of the state has been opened up to private capital. Ambulances can only be called if you pay beforehand. The police and NRA (now a vast mercenary army) can be hired at will. Children are educated in brand loyalty by company schools (one wonders what a diet of MacDonalds does for the growing young) and all citizens take the name of their employer as their surname.
The USA, which has become something only loosely like a nation at all, now covers the entire English-speaking world. The other nations of Europe are described as “socialist” (as the word is currently used in the US, this only means “bad”, so it is quite likely that they are democracies of some kind).
The opening concept is terrific. To sell its new shoes, Nike wants to show how desirable they are. So, the company arranges that a hitman will kill the first people to buy the shoes. After all, if people will kill for these shoes, they must be worth having. But then the hitman outsources, and chaos ensues.
Barry’s world is an exaggeration of our own, but not a totally impossible one. It is perhaps strange that Barry’s America formally owns the territory it controls economically, but given the very low level of investment involved in owning land in this future – the government serves only to prevent crime, having had all its power stripped away to allow for greater “freedom”, ie corporate control - it’s probably not very difficult to capture new territory. It's also surprising that Ayn Rand is not yet worshiped as a goddess, but perhaps the citizens have tried reading her books.
The main problem with Jennifer Government, I feel, is the tone. Barry’s characters are thinly sketched, and the story slides from satire to slapstick. Furthermore, the thinness of the characters makes them unsympathetic; there are no Guy Montags or Offreds here. They’re neither deep enough to be likeable or funny enough to be genuinely comic – and sooner or later, if you write comedy, you have to start telling jokes. Hank Nike, in particular, is simply an imbecile, and his pratfalls suggest a much lighter novel. The last third feels at points as if piano music should be plonking out over the climax of a silent film, as various characters scramble towards their destinies and the jolly adventure rather leaves the serious points behind. The whole thing feels cartoony.
At points, the silliness of the story detracts from the fact that this is a rather horrible future, where the poor are absolutely worthless and value means only dollars. What Barry is portraying, in effect, is a society where the links between people have been reduced to financial exploitation and nothing more. You don’t have to be a leftist to by slightly chilled by this crazed extrapolation of Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment that there is “no such thing as society”.
That said, it's much better to have a lively novel like this than a self-righteous lecture about the evils of the shopping mall. (The critic B.R. Myers makes short work of several worthy anti-capitalist tomes in his A Reader’s Manifesto). It is also quite likely that some readers will write this book off as just a tract, but books that actually satirise the way we are going right now will always be needed and are surprisingly rare. After all, Stalin is dead and WW2 is over, and there’s enough po-faced Marines-vs-the-space-Communazis out there already. It’s good to know that satire still exists, and can recognise the trends and worries of the modern era. It’s just a shame that Barry didn’t flesh Jennifer Government out a bit more. As it is, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Jennifer Government by Max Barry is set in a strange, only slightly unlikely world where capitalism has gone berserk. Essentially, every possible function of the state has been opened up to private capital. Ambulances can only be called if you pay beforehand. The police and NRA (now a vast mercenary army) can be hired at will. Children are educated in brand loyalty by company schools (one wonders what a diet of MacDonalds does for the growing young) and all citizens take the name of their employer as their surname.
The USA, which has become something only loosely like a nation at all, now covers the entire English-speaking world. The other nations of Europe are described as “socialist” (as the word is currently used in the US, this only means “bad”, so it is quite likely that they are democracies of some kind).
The opening concept is terrific. To sell its new shoes, Nike wants to show how desirable they are. So, the company arranges that a hitman will kill the first people to buy the shoes. After all, if people will kill for these shoes, they must be worth having. But then the hitman outsources, and chaos ensues.
Barry’s world is an exaggeration of our own, but not a totally impossible one. It is perhaps strange that Barry’s America formally owns the territory it controls economically, but given the very low level of investment involved in owning land in this future – the government serves only to prevent crime, having had all its power stripped away to allow for greater “freedom”, ie corporate control - it’s probably not very difficult to capture new territory. It's also surprising that Ayn Rand is not yet worshiped as a goddess, but perhaps the citizens have tried reading her books.
The main problem with Jennifer Government, I feel, is the tone. Barry’s characters are thinly sketched, and the story slides from satire to slapstick. Furthermore, the thinness of the characters makes them unsympathetic; there are no Guy Montags or Offreds here. They’re neither deep enough to be likeable or funny enough to be genuinely comic – and sooner or later, if you write comedy, you have to start telling jokes. Hank Nike, in particular, is simply an imbecile, and his pratfalls suggest a much lighter novel. The last third feels at points as if piano music should be plonking out over the climax of a silent film, as various characters scramble towards their destinies and the jolly adventure rather leaves the serious points behind. The whole thing feels cartoony.
At points, the silliness of the story detracts from the fact that this is a rather horrible future, where the poor are absolutely worthless and value means only dollars. What Barry is portraying, in effect, is a society where the links between people have been reduced to financial exploitation and nothing more. You don’t have to be a leftist to by slightly chilled by this crazed extrapolation of Margaret Thatcher’s famous comment that there is “no such thing as society”.
That said, it's much better to have a lively novel like this than a self-righteous lecture about the evils of the shopping mall. (The critic B.R. Myers makes short work of several worthy anti-capitalist tomes in his A Reader’s Manifesto). It is also quite likely that some readers will write this book off as just a tract, but books that actually satirise the way we are going right now will always be needed and are surprisingly rare. After all, Stalin is dead and WW2 is over, and there’s enough po-faced Marines-vs-the-space-Communazis out there already. It’s good to know that satire still exists, and can recognise the trends and worries of the modern era. It’s just a shame that Barry didn’t flesh Jennifer Government out a bit more. As it is, it feels like a missed opportunity.
