Scorch A. D. Nauman Soft Skull Press 232 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

A.D. Nauman joins the ranks of dystopists with Scorch, set about thirty years from today in a future that is ruled by corporations run wild. Her Winston Smith is a thirtyish woman named Arel Ashe, an inhabitant of Chicago who works two jobs just to afford a phone-booth apartment. Like all of the people around her, she is driven ceaselessly to consume: her clothing is constantly out-of-date, her car is not stylish enough, her hair has too many bangs, too few bangs, is too curly, isn't curly enough. Relationships are just another way of getting ahead, pooling resources, networking. Sex is aggressive, power-driven, and apparently conducted entirely from behind. Arel has memories of a better time, a less stressful time. Her mother was a professor at the University of Chicago before it was privatized (like all other schools in this corporate future) and rededicated exclusively to training future executives. Traditional subjects, and her mother's job, were done away with; her mother later died in a random shooting perpetrated by one of the homeless thousands who feel trapped and left behind in this world. Now, Arel works as a functionary in an "Ad-film" studio, which produces movies that exist exclusively to sell products through the use of sex and violence. Her night job is as clerk in a library, the collection of which consists of how-to videos.

Through a series of events that chronicle her awakening to the emptiness and Darwinist excess of the world around her, Arel loses her job, falls in love, and tries to foment a revolution based on what she has learned from books. The quick-witted student of apocalyptic fiction will see the borrowings Nauman has made from her predecessors' work: the three companies of her future mimic the three warring mega-countries of 1984; the ad-stories echo the "feelies" of Brave New World; the fetishizing of books as repositories of lost knowledge is straight out of Farenheit 451; the mindlessness of the corporate mindset smacks of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece of bureaucracy, Brazil. The problem is, Nauman doesn't seem to have much to add to what has been, at best, a shallow-but-scary genre. With occasional exceptions, dystopian fiction has dragged down those who tackle it into a morass of preachy screeds and paper-thin characters. Nauman has not only succumbed to this unfortunate tradition, but fails to sustain even marginal interest beyond a perverse schadenfreude in the reader; the two things that made me finish this novel were my honor as a reviewer and morbid curiosity about how awkwardly the author would hammer home her very narrow political agenda.

The brief author bio under Nauman's rather attractive photo in the back of the book notes that she characterizes herself as "classic Generation W: old enough to know what a social conscience is, young enough to still have one." Firstly, this statement is ludicrously (if unintentionally) offensive to any number of thinking Americans, young and old. Secondly, it contains a glaring split infinitive (I digress). It does, however, serve as a useful warning of how Nauman views her function as an author. She has created a world of corporations without governmental oversight, then thrown the concept into overdrive. She has done this in order to make the reader fear that we are headed toward such a world. Obviously, then, there are two points of view in this book: the author's idea of where society should go, and the exact opposite of the author's idea of where society should go. This is not conducive to the creation of a fully realized fictional world.

The characters in the book parrot extreme versions of "Republican Revolution" slogans that were popular in the mid-nineties. People talk about how glad they are that they don't live under "Big Brother Government" the way their grandparents did. They celebrate "choice" and "economic freedom", make "go-gettedness" the ultimate ideal, and view any regulation that would limit personal or corporate freedom with suspicion. Of course, all of this simplistic, reductivist, self-defeating thinking could only have come to the fore in a world of unfettered, global free-market capitalism. Thus, we learn that Republicans and globalism are bad. The way that the book unfolds, there are two types of understanding of Nauman's fictional world that occur simultaneously: Firstly, Arel Ashe discovers the way things used to be through books, especially a critique of modern materialism that was (dum-dum-dum!) written by her mother! Secondly, we readers learn about the strange world Arel inhabits as she goes through her day-to-day routine. Unfortunately, the points Nauman makes don't lend themselves to character development, plot interest, elegance of language, clarity of style, or literary/aesthetic purpose.

Scorch is, in fact, a political pamphlet. Ayn Rand used to write political pamphlets in the form of ponderous pseudo-novels, and there are still some people who think she hung the moon. Sure, these people tend to view libertarianism as the supreme aesthetic value, but they are, undeniably, out there. I assume there is a similar group of left-leaning didacticists who are craving just what Nauman has provided: a none-too-original approach to a reductivist view of how the world works. No doubt, she will be preaching to the choir, but telling an audience what it already wants to hear is the proper purview of the political pamphleteer. Revealing a new side of the ever-more-tangled mystery of the human heart -- that is the purpose of the artist.

-- Brett McCallon

Soft Skull Press is fearless, progressive, punk-rock/hip-hop literature. Based in New York City's Lower East Side, Soft Skull publishes the history, pop culture studies, art, poetry and fiction that fuel the vanguard.