Stay Positive

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer


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Published: Dec 8, 2009

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In Cory Doctorow's future, the geeks actually have inherited the Earth. In Makers (Tor, Oct. 27), venture capitalists roam the land, freely rewarding pajama-clad innovators. Three-D printing, cheap and widespread, lets anyone copy consumer goods, from complex circuits to machine guns.Thus Detroit is reborn, phoenix-like: His characters gather at Devil's Night, a once-fire-ravaged Brush Park mansion, now a restaurant named after the city's pre-Halloween tradition of arson. "Reclaiming these buildings was an artisanal practice of urethaning the charred wood and adding clever putty, cement and glass to preserve the look of a burned-out hulk while restoring structural integrity," he writes. The city's decay is effectively metamorphosized into a theme restaurant.

Devil's Night merely provides a backdrop for a reunion, one of the countless strange, clever tossed-off ideas packed into Makers. But it's an indication of how out-of-step with our current recessionary dread Doctorow's optimism is. After all, among all of the year-in-review news roundups that dominate newsstands, Detroit figures as a central symbol for current economic failures and an ominous portent of a bleak future to come.

As much as any post-bailout banker, Doctorow has faith in a cyclical economy of boom and bust. He's got rose-colored lenses in thick black frames, and he's caught up in an infectious enthusiasm for all the cool stuff technology and imagination can provide. To his credit, he puts his money where his mouth is, distributing Makers not only in dead-tree form, but serially on his publisher's Web site and as a free download on his own (craphound.com).

But as a true believer, it's Doctorow's ideas that interest him, not his characters or their situations. While Makers has the predictive glee of a William Gibson book, its speechifying and cardboard clumsiness reads closer to Ayn Rand.

The book's third act, for example, details the conflict between Doctorow's open-source heroes and ruthlessly monetizing behemoth Disney, as both mount competing tech-themed amusement parks. The storyline shows how specific Doctorow's gee-whiz ideas are; after all, in a speculative novel about large-scale economic and cultural cycles, a carnival midway makes a trivial choice as open source's chief site of resistance. It's a clear and detailed vision, but because of its specificity it gives only a limited kind of hope, a plasticky veneer over a burned-out hulk.

Even if Doctorow's enthusiasm makes him an outlier among writers tackling the recession, he joins good company. Detroit's specter has also inspired the gallows humor of Jess Walter's Financial Lives of the Poets (Harper, Sept. 22), where a busted blogger deals drugs to stave off foreclosure. And it hovers in the background of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply (Ballantine, Aug. 25), a far subtler and more chilling sketch of the shadowy places where technology and economics meet. Chaon's conjuring of free-floating dread marks it as one of the most resonant books of the year.

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The cold emptiness of the not-quite ghost town gets its best rendition from Michelle Wildgen in But Not for Long (Thomas Dunne, Oct. 13). Her focus is as tight and restrained as Doctorow's is sprawling. Where he covers decades and continents, she sticks with a cast of housemates in a Madison co-op, during a few days in a midsummer blackout. That blackout's only one of the signs that something's gone wrong: It's preceded by gasoline shortages at filling stations and the disappearance of bees. The book opens, eerily and beautifully, with a drifting dock in the lake behind the co-op and a dog abandoned alone on it.

Each of these signs and events are just hints, backdrops for Wildgen's meaty, vibrant characters and their personal crises. Hal scrambles for donations for the food bank he manages while trying to track down his father. After rescuing the raft-bound dog, Karin escapes the darkened city to a small artisan cheese farm. And Greta, new to the co-op, deals with her estranged alcoholic husband, Will, who turns up on their porch with no intention of leaving. These stories are well and sensitively told, and Greta, especially, shows off Wildgen's talent for complexity and ambiguity.

The end of the book belongs to Will. He doesn't wrap up the plot, or tie down loose ends; instead, with no less realism or grace than in the rest of the novel, his narration shifts the focus and draws together the resonances Wildgen has set up, through the blackout and the hints of catastrophe. They resolve into something like a chord, entirely through implication, in an amazingly unobtrusive virtuoso display.

But Not for Long gives just a hint of a hope for better things, not through cutting-edge technology or even electric lights and full gas tanks, but through quieter miracles of resolution and forgiveness.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)